Chaim Topol, the Israeli actor, who has died aged 87, became indelibly associated in the public mind with just one role, that of Tevye, the dairyman singing and dancing his way around a farmyard as he dreams of being a wealthy man, in Norman Jewison’s 1971 film of the hit musical Fiddler on the Roof.
Topol stumbled into musical stardom. It all started when the Broadway producer Hal Prince got wind of his performance in the 1964 Israeli film Sallah Shabati, in which he played a middle-aged Jewish Yemenite immigrant arriving in Israel with his family. The film was nominated for an Oscar and featured the 28-year-old actor sporting a grey beard to pretend he was much older than he was.
 |
| Chaim Topol in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2015. AP |
Yet Topol hated it: “It was a matinée,” he recalled. “I can’t explain it, but Zero was going wild. He said things like, ‘Mrs Finkelstein, are you yawning because I’m boring you or was it because your husband kept you awake all night?’ I didn’t know what to do with myself. I telegrammed back saying there was no way I wanted to be connected to that show.”
When the musical opened in Tel Aviv (where it was performed in Hebrew), another actor took the part, followed, after a year, by Topol’s old teacher. But when the teacher fell ill in 1965, Topol started understudying for four shows a week.
Two years later, when he was summoned to play the part at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, he assumed it was because the producers had happened to see him in the role in Tel Aviv rather than the other, more established, actor. At the time he spoke hardly a word of English, so he learned the script parrot-fashion from an LP of Zero Mostel on Broadway.
From 1967 the show ran for four years at Her Majesty’s to enthusiastic reviews. It was in London, too, that he became known simply as “Topol”. The producers of the show found it difficult to pronounce the name Chaim and, with his permission, omitted it from the playbill.
It was in his last month in the role in London that Topol was cast by Norman Jewison in the film. His performance won him a Golden Globe Award and a Best Actor Oscar nomination. He went on to reprise the role in theatrical productions in London, on Broadway and other locations around the world.
According to his own estimate he sang the production’s best-known song If I Were A Rich Man on stage more than 3,500 times before taking his final bow in 2009.
Chaim Topol was born on September 9, 1935 in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv. His parents, Josef and Rela, had left Poland in 1933 for Palestine, where his father worked as a labourer and his mother as a seamstress. They were the only members of his family to survive the war.
 |
| Director Norman Jewison, right, and Israeli actor Topol, who played protagonist Tevye. ZEITGEIST FILMS |
In 1956 he married Galia Finkelstein and moved on to her family’s kibbutz. Together they started their own satirical theatre group, The Spring Onions, which toured Israel entertaining the troops. When the group split up after four years he became assistant director of the municipal theatre in Haifa, where he made his professional stage debut as Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew and also appeared in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
After his triumphant four years doing Fiddler On The Roof in London, for a while Topol declined invitations to reprise it elsewhere, not wanting to be Tevye forever.
However his appearance as Tevye brought roles in British theatre, with performances at the Chichester Festival, where he won acclaim as Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but earned mixed reviews as Othello, one critic complaining that he was so congenial as the Moor “we never ever fear for Desdemona”.
 |
| Film producer Norman Jewison (left), actress Norma Crane and actor Chaim Topol at the London premiere of Fiddler on the Roof in 1971. GETTY |
On screen, Topol played the title role in Joseph Losey’s Galileo (1975), to mixed reviews, and also took small parts in Hollywood productions including the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981), in which he played a Greek millionaire, and Flash Gordon (1980), in which he played the mad scientist Zarkov. On television he appeared in the epic American miniseries The Winds of War as a Holocaust victim, and in The House on Garibaldi Street, he played the Nazi hunter who tracked down Adolf Eichmann.
In 1982 he returned to the London stage as Tevye in a Royal Variety Performance described by critics as a genuinely electrifying experience, and the following year he took the lead in a revival of Fiddler at the Apollo Theatre.
In the late 1980s, by then the approximate age of his character, he played the role in a touring production in the United States. In 1990, he again played the part in a Broadway revival, and was nominated in 1991 for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical, losing to Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon.
He played the part again in a 1994 London revival, which became a touring production, sharing the stage with his actress daughter Ady, who played Tevye’s daughter Chava. After that he appeared in several more productions around the world, including stages in Europe, Australia and Japan.
Throughout his career, Topol continued to serve for 42 days every year in the Israeli army until age made him ineligible. He served in the Six Day War of 1967 and was drafted again during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when he served as a liaison officer in the Golan Heights.
In later life Topol used the wealth he amassed during his career as an actor to build a holiday home for Arab and Jewish children with incurable illnesses. “It’s the most important thing that I have ever done,” he explained to an interviewer. “All the rest is little episodes.”
Topol is survived by his wife Galia and their son and two daughters.
The Telegraph, London
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own.
First published at Sydney Morning Herald website, March 10, 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment