TEVYE WAS SIGNATURE ROLE IN ‘FIDDLER ON THE ROOF’ ON STAGE, SCREEN
Topol, the Israeli actor who took on the role of the patriarch Tevye, the soulful shtetl milkman at the center of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in his late 20s and reprised the role for decades, died Thursday at his home in Tel Aviv. He was 87.
His son, Omer Topol, confirmed the death. He said in an email that his father had Alzheimer’s disease, which had caused his health to deteriorate over the past year.
Topol — born Chaim Topol, he used only his surname throughout much of his professional life — came to international renown heading the cast of the 1971 film version of “Fiddler.” Its director, Norman Jewison, had chosen Topol, then a little-known stage actor, over Zero Mostel, who had created the part on Broadway.
The film, for which Topol earned an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award, made him a star. For much of the late 20th century he would be, in the words of The Jerusalem Post in 2012, “Israel’s most famous export since the Jaffa orange.”
Topol reprised Tevye in stage productions worldwide for decades, including a 1990 Broadway revival for which he received a Tony nomination. By 2009, he had, by his own estimate, played the character more than 3,500 times.
His other films include “Galileo,” director Joseph Losey’s 1975 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s stage play, in which he played the title role; “Flash Gordon” (1980), in which he portrayed scientist Hans Zarkov; and the James Bond film “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), starring Roger Moore, in which he played Greek smuggler Milos Columbo.
On television, Topol played the Polish Jew Berel Jastrow in the 1983 miniseries “The Winds of War” and reprised the role for its sequel, “War and Remembrance,” broadcast in 1988 and 1989.
But it was indisputably for Tevye — the weary, tradition-bound Everyman who argues with God, bemoans his lot as the penurious father of five daughters and lives increasingly warily amid the pogroms of early 20th-century Czarist Russia — that Topol remained best known.
Throughout his many Tevyes, some critics taxed Topol’s acting as larger than life to the point of self-parody. But most praised his soulful mien and his resonant bass baritone, heard in enduring numbers like “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Tradition” and “Sunrise, Sunset.”
By the time Jewison began work on the “Fiddler” film, Tevye was one of the most coveted roles in Hollywood. The Broadway show, based on stories by Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem — with book by Joseph Stein, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and music by Jerry Bock — had been a smash hit since it opened in 1964. It won nine Tony Awards, including best musical, best direction of a musical (for Jerome Robbins) and, for Mostel, best actor in a musical.
“The casting of it was the most agonizing thing I ever went through,” Jewison told NPR in 2001.
Besides Mostel, aspirants to the screen role included Rod Steiger, Danny Kaye and — in a scenario that can be contemplated only with difficulty — Frank Sinatra.
Chaim Topol was born in Tel Aviv on Sept. 9, 1935. His parents, Jacob Topol, a plasterer, and Rel Goldman Topol, a seamstress, had f led shtetlach in Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine in the early 1930s. There, Jacob Topol became a member of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization.
As a youth, Chaim studied commercial art and trained for a career as a printer. But in 1953, while he was serving in the Israeli army, an officer overheard him regaling fellow recruits with jokes. He was placed in an army entertainment unit and found his calling there.
Topol’s first significant international exposure came in the title role of the 1964 Israeli film “Sallah” (also known as “Sallah Shabati”). One of the first film comedies to come out of Israel, it told the tale of a family of Mizrahi Jews — Jews historically from the Middle East and North Africa — uneasily resettled in Israel.
On the strength of that performance, he was asked to play Tevye in a Hebrewlanguage production of “Fiddler” in Tel Aviv.
He played the role for about a year.
Topol opened in London production of “Fiddler” in February 1967 to glowing notices. By then he had jettisoned his first name.
After seeing the London “Fiddler,” Jewison made the unexpected decision to cast Topol, still a relative unknown in the United States, in the motion picture.
Year in and year out, Topol found the role he knew best to be a source of continuing illumination.
“I did ‘Fiddler’ a long time thinking that this was a story about the Jewish people,” he said in a 2009 interview. “But now I’ve been performing all over the world. And the fantastic thing is wherever I’ve been — India, Japan, England, Greece, Egypt — people come up to me after the show and say, ‘This is our story as well.’ ”