Theodore Bikel, who has died at the age of 91 in Los Angeles, was a shtarke, unlike many showbiz stars who merely play shtarkes on TV or onscreen. The barrel-chested, booming-voiced actor and singer had talent and stamina, the kind that allowed him to play Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” over 2000 times. After over sixty years as a folk singer Bikel offered resonant, blunt, direct performances that captivated audiences.
A lifelong fighter, as a youngster in Vienna after the 1938 Anschluss, he returned home bloodied from schoolyard brawls with anti-Semitic classmates, as he recounted in Theo: An Autobiography.
...Bikel’s social consciousness grew during the 1960s. He was arrested for was participating in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, and as an opponent to the Vietnam War, he was elected as a delegate for Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 Democratic National Convention where he led other delegates in folk songs and ballads decrying Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley, who had authorized the use of force against demonstrators.
Rare for a successful actor — Bikel was twice nominated for Tony Awards, in 1958 for “The Rope Dancers,” a domestic tragedy by Morton Wishengrad (1913-1962), and also for “The Sound of Music” — he was concerned about the fate of other actors. Circa 1960 he became active in Actor’s Equity, in 1964 he was elected vice-president and in 1973 became president of the organization, a post he held for a decade. An advocate of collective labor, Bikel noted: “If it were not for the unions and guilds, we would have nothing to protect us from our own folly or from those who seek to abuse our love for what we do.”
Despite his varied career, including screen appearances as Zoltan Karpathy, a Hungarian phonetician (the “hairy hound from Budapest”) in “My Fair Lady” (1964) to a rock group manager in Frank Zappa’s rock film”200 Motels” it is as a fighter for social justice that Bikel may be best remembered.
-- The Forward
I remember Bikel leading a march from Carnegie Hall to the Village Gate at the conclusion of an all-night antiwar concert in the mid 1960s.