Theodore Bikel: A Voice in Twenty-One Languages
At the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, Bob Dylan plugged in and Pete Seeger came close to detonating. The man who talked him down was a Broadway leading actor who had co-founded the festival six years earlier. "Peter, this band, these rebels — they are us," Theodore Bikel told him. "They are what we were 20 years ago. Remember?" Seeger, staring like a trauma victim, relented. That Bikel was in the room at all — and had the standing to say it — is the whole shape of his career in one anecdote.
Vienna, 1938
Theodore Meir Bikel was born in Vienna on 2 May 1924. His father Josef, a Zionist from Bukovina, named him after Theodor Herzl. The naming turned out to be prophecy of a blunt kind: when the Anschluss came in 1938, the family fled to Palestine, getting out on British passports secured through his father's contacts. Bikel was thirteen.
In Palestine he studied at the Mikve Yisrael agricultural school and joined Kibbutz Kfar HaMaccabi. He began performing with the Habimah Theatre in 1943 and became a founding member of the Cameri, which grew into a pillar of Israeli theatre. He rated that training above what he later encountered in America: "The Habimah people were much closer to the Method," he said, "than Lee Strasberg was."
He left in 1945 for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London — and never went back to live in Israel, a decision that troubled him permanently. He did not fight in the 1948 war. In his memoir *Theo* he wrote that some contemporaries "regarded [it] as a character flaw," and that "in me there remains a small, still voice that asks whether I can ever fully acquit myself in my own mind."
The Useful Foreigner
British films of the late 1940s and 1950s needed continental villains, and Bikel — who had perfected an English accent and could produce almost any other on demand — supplied them by the dozen. The break came in 1948, when Michael Redgrave recommended him to Laurence Olivier as understudy for *A Streetcar Named Desire* in the West End. He also played Pablo Gonzales, and when a cast member fell ill he went on opposite Vivien Leigh with no warning. Her verdict afterwards was two words: "Well done."
Hollywood then cast him in the same register, and he was very good at it: an Imperial German naval officer in *The African Queen* (1951) alongside Bogart and Hepburn; a Nazi U-boat officer in *The Enemy Below*; Zoltan Karpathy, the Hungarian linguist, in *My Fair Lady*; a Soviet submarine captain in *The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming*. He screen-tested for Goldfinger and lost to Gert Fröbe. The role that stuck was Sheriff Max Muller in *The Defiant Ones* in 1958, which brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He became an American citizen in 1961.
Von Trapp, Then Tevye
On Broadway he created Captain von Trapp in the original 1959 *The Sound of Music*, opposite Mary Martin, earning a Tony nomination. He was initially unhappy that Rodgers and Hammerstein were wasting his voice; on realising he was a serious folk singer, they wrote "Edelweiss" for him.
Then, from 1969, came the part that defined him. Bikel played Tevye in *Fiddler on the Roof* more than 2,000 times — more than any other actor who has ever taken the role. In 2010 he stepped in for Chaim Topol on a North American tour when injury forced Topol out.
The Folk Singer
From 1955 Elektra Records put him in a studio and he did not really stop, recording more than twenty albums, with counts running as high as thirty-seven. He sang fluently in twenty-one languages — Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, French, medieval Spanish, Zulu, English among them.
In 1959 he co-founded the Newport Folk Festival with Pete Seeger, Harold Leventhal, Oscar Brand and George Wein, believing music to be "one of the few answers to the chaos that we have" and a means of giving young people hope. In 1962 he became the first artist other than Dylan to perform "Blowin' in the Wind" in public. After the 1963 festival he travelled with Seeger and Dylan to Greenwood, Mississippi, where Dylan sang his new "Only a Pawn in Their Game" about the murder of Medgar Evers. With Herb Cohen he opened The Unicorn, the first folk coffeehouse in Los Angeles, and then Cosmo Alley, which put Maya Angelou and Lenny Bruce on the same small stage.
The Union Man
Bikel gave decades to organised labour and to politics. He co-founded the Actors Federal Credit Union in 1962, served as president of Actors' Equity from 1977 to 1982, and led the Associated Actors and Artistes of America from 1988 to 2014. He was a McCarthy delegate at the 1968 Democratic Convention and campaigned for Kennedy — sometimes between the matinee and evening shows of *The Sound of Music*, until the producers objected and Eleanor Roosevelt collected him backstage as her personal guest.
He was arrested in 1986 outside the Soviet Embassy protesting for Soviet Jewry, worked against apartheid, chaired the progressive-Zionist Partners for Progressive Israel, and in 2010 signed a letter supporting Israeli actors who refused to perform in West Bank settlements. Carter put him on the National Council for the Arts in 1977. His explanation for all of it was one sentence: "Whenever I see an individual or group singled out for persecution, there's a switch thrown in my mind — and they become Jews."
He died on 21 July 2015 in Los Angeles, aged 91, the last surviving principal of *The African Queen*.
Why Theodore Is Called a Genius
The quality is range, and range of an unusually literal kind. Bikel could hold twenty-one languages in performance-ready condition — not phrasebook competence, but singing them with the idiom and phrasing that persuade native speakers. That is a linguistic and auditory faculty most people simply do not have; he was, not incidentally, a member of Mensa. Onstage it translated into an actor who was believable as an Imperial German officer, a Russian submariner, a Hungarian phonetician and a Ukrainian Jewish milkman, and a singer who could carry a Rodgers and Hammerstein ballad and a Zulu folk song in the same career.
But the honest framing is that this is virtuosity of instrument rather than originality of vision. Bikel did not write the plays or, mostly, the songs; his own composition amounted to a late one-man Sholom Aleichem show. He was a supremely gifted interpreter and a superb utility man, which is why his filmography reads as a catalogue of other people's foreigners. Even his most famous role he inherited rather than created.
Where he was original was in refusing the usual division of labour. He co-founded a festival that reshaped American popular music, ran two actors' unions for decades, got arrested for a cause, and did his 2,000th Tevye. His own summary of what he was proudest of was not any of the films: "presenting the songs of my people, songs of pain and songs of hope."
Legacy
Bikel's monument is diffuse by design. It is the Newport Folk Festival, an actors' credit union, a Yiddish repertoire kept alive on record when it was in danger of vanishing, and "Edelweiss," written for his voice. He was the rare performer whose service to his profession may outlast his performances in it.
