He appears on numerous recordings in a wide range of folk songs in several languages, delivered in a fine baritone voice.
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Theodore Bikel, an actor and folk singer who was recognized in 1997 with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, has died at 91.
As well as working on stage productions, Theodore Bikel also starred in classic movies such as The African Queen, The Pride and the Passion, The Defiant Ones (for which he received an Oscar nomination for his role alongside Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis), and as the dialect expert Zoltan Karpathy in My Fair Lady. He played the character in more than 2,000 performances, touring in the musical and becoming as firmly associated with it as either original Broadway star Zero Mostel or Topol, who played Tevye in the screen adaptation.
Among his film roles, he played the grumpy Soviet submarine captain in the Oscar-nominated 1966 Cold War comedy ” The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.
He recorded 37 albums, more than 20 for Electra.
Bikel, who jokingly referred to himself as “the poor man’s Peter Ustinov”, was eighty when he acquired a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 2005. He also penned the book “Folksongs and Footnotes” as well as an autobiography, “Theo“, published in 1995. Asner said.
Bikel did not consider his activism at odds with his work as a performer.
“Professionally, I can count three or four separate existences”, he said.
Born in Vienna in 1924, Bikel fled the 1938 invasion of Austria by Nazi Germany, heading for the Middle East, where his acting career began a few years later at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv. One of the Opera’s board members was hosting Bikel at his home while Bikel made an appearance at a local Jewish Charity, but when the performance was over and the cast party was in full swing in the vast rehearsal room at Lyric Opera, his host phoned Bikel and told him to come over. He would lean on his pitchfork, he wrote, singing about “the nobility of work which I was not doing too well”. He co-founded the Israeli Chamber Theater before leaving in 1946 to study at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
He drew his first Tony nomination in 1958 for “The Rope Dancers” and picked up his second two years later for “The Sound of Music”.
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In 1959, he created the position of Capt. von Trapp in the unique Broadway manufacturing of “The Sound of Music“, enjoying reverse Mary Martin as Maria. Both were nominated for Tony Awards – she won – and left the show together after two years on Broadway.
