Theodore Bikel

Theodore Bikel
Background information
Born	Theodore Meir Bikel May 2, 1924 Vienna, Austria
Died	July 21, 2015 (aged 91) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation	Actor, folk singer
Years active	1946–2007
Spouse	Ofra Ichilov ​(m. 1942; div. 1943) Rita Weinberg Call ​(m. 1967; div. 2008) Tamara Brooks ​(m. 2008; died 2012) Aimee Ginsburg ​(m. 2013)
Children	2

Theodore Bikel was an Austrian-American actor, folk singer, musician, composer, unionist and political activist. He appeared in films including The African Queen (1951); Moulin Rouge (1952); The Enemy Below (1957); I Want to Live! (1958); My Fair Lady (1964); The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), and 200 Motels (1971). For his portrayal of Sheriff Max Muller in The Defiant Ones (1958), he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

He made his stage debut in Tevye the Milkman in Tel Aviv, Israel, when he was in his teens. He later studied acting at Britain's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his London stage debut in 1948 and in New York in 1955. He was also a widely recognized and recorded folk singer and guitarist. In 1959, he co-founded the Newport Folk Festival and created the role of Captain von Trapp opposite Mary Martin as Maria in the original Broadway production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. In 1969, Bikel began acting and singing on stage as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, a role he performed more often than any other actor to date. The production won nine Tony Awards and was one of the longest-running musicals in Broadway history.

Bikel was president of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America until 2014 and was president of Actors' Equity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He served as the Chair of the Board of Directors of Partners for Progressive Israel, where he also lectured.

Early life

Theodore Bikel was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, the son of Miriam (née Riegler) and Josef Bikel, from Bukovina. As an active Zionist, his father named him after Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. Following the German union with Austria in 1938, Bikel's family fled to Mandatory Palestine, where his father's contacts helped the family obtain British passports. Bikel studied at the Mikve Yisrael agricultural school and joined Kibbutz Kfar HaMaccabi.

Bikel started acting while in his teens. He performed with Habimah Theatre in 1943 and was one of the founding members of the Cameri Theatre, which became a leading Israeli theatre company. He described his acting experience there as similar to, if not better than, the Method acting techniques taught at the Actors Studio in New York. "The Habimah people were much closer to the Method, indeed, than Lee Strasberg was because they were direct disciples of Stanislavski."

In 1945, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Bikel moved to the United States in 1954 and became a naturalized citizen in 1961.

Bikel did not return to live in Israel nor did he take part in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Bikel wrote in his autobiography, Theo: "A few of my contemporaries regarded [not returning to Israel] as a character flaw, if not a downright act of desertion. In me there remains a small, still voice that asks whether I can ever fully acquit myself in my own mind."

External links

• Theodore Bikel Official website
• Theodore Bikel
• Theodore Bikel at the Internet Movie Database
• Part 1 of interview by Jerry Williams on WMEX Radio in Boston hours after the Kennedy Assassination
• Part 2 of interview by Jerry Williams on WMEX Radio in Boston hours after the Kennedy Assassination
• Interview with Theodore Bikel – Ames Tribune, 24 10 January 2015.
• Theodore Bikel at Find a Grave

This page uses content from the English Wikipedia page Theodore Bikel. The revision history lists the authors. The text on Warner Bros. Entertainment Wiki and Wikipedia is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (CC BY-SA).