The actor and folk-singer Theodore Bikel, who has died aged 91, was a multilingual polymath whose career on stage, screen and television stretched across seven decades. As a character actor in film, the thickset Austrian-born Jew was called upon to play a vast range of foreigners, many of them in uniform. But if truth were told, Bikel, who had a fine baritone speaking and singing voice, was given little chance to shine (or sing) in his 50-film career.
More satisfying was his finely toned performance as Tevye the milkman in Fiddler on the Roof, whom he played more than 2,000 times all over the US. Although Zero Mostel originally created the part on Broadway in 1962, and Topol played it in Norman Jewison’s 1971 film, for US theatregoers Bikel became identified as much with the role as Yul Brynner was with The King and I. Bikel, who criticised Mostel for his “improvised shtick”, based Tevye on his grandfather, who had “a similar lively relationship with God”.
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