![]() Together they started their own satirical theatre group, The Spring Onions, which toured Israel entertaining the troops. In 1956 he married Galia Finkelstein and moved on to her family’s kibbutz. Four years later he began four years’ national service in the Israeli army and, after basic training, got his first taste of acting when he joined a theatrical corp, where he was promoted to commander. Topol left school aged 14 to become a printer. They were the only members of his family to survive the war. 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. ![]() 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.Ĭhaim Topol was born on Septemin Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv. He went on to reprise the role in theatrical productions in London, on Broadway and other locations around the world. His performance won him a Golden Globe Award and a Best Actor Oscar nomination. It was in his last month in the role in London that Topol was cast by Norman Jewison in the film. 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 London, too, that he became known simply as “Topol”. 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.įrom 1967 the show ran for four years at Her Majesty’s to enthusiastic reviews. 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. But when the teacher fell ill in 1965, Topol started understudying for four shows a week. 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. I telegrammed back saying there was no way I wanted to be connected to that show.” 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 can’t explain it, but Zero was going wild. Yet Topol hated it: “It was a matinée,” he recalled. On the strength of his performance Prince invited him to take a look at the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof (with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick and book by Joseph Stein), starring the great Zero Mostel, with a view to his taking the role in Israel. 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. 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 an middle-aged Jewish Yemenite immigrant arriving in Israel with his family. 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 shtetl 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.
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