Chaim Topol spent the vast majority of his acting life known for his Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, and much of it being asked if he minded.
“Let’s face it, it’s one of the best parts ever written for a male actor in musical theatre,” he told one of the many inquisitors to ask that question when the Tel Aviv-born star – known as Israel’s greatest export since the Jaffa orange - had played the role a mere 700 times. He would go on to play it, he reckoned, about 2,800 times more.
He was in his late 20s when he first took on the role for Norman Jewison’s 1971 movie version of the Broadway hit. Jewison (who despite his name and the fact that he directed what remains the biggest Jewish hit in cinema history was not himself Jewish) cast Topol in the role of the milkman from the Shalom Aleichem stories instead of opting for the much more obvious choice of Zero Mostel, the Broadway star who had created the role in New York.
The director’s decision to go with an Israeli actor who cut his performative teeth in the army entertaining troops was an agonising one. Competition for the role included Rod Steiger, Danny Kaye, and in an era when authenticity casting was not even a notion let alone a requirement, even Frank Sinatra.
Actor Chaim Topol with director Norman Jewison on the set of the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof (Credit: Zeitgeist Films)
But by then Topol had claimed the role as his own after producers of the first London production in 1967 invited him to audition.
Convincing as Tevye, who was 30 or more years older than the actor playing him, was a remarkable feat. However over the following decades Topol would literally grow into the character. By the time he reprised the role for the umpteenth time at London’s Palladium in 1994, he had a Tony Award for his New York performance to fill the gap that the Oscar might have occupied if he had won it.
In that London production, he was at last the age he should have been when he first played Tevye. He had grown by then not only in years but authority.
Yet he had lost none of the sweetness that defined his performance and which Jewish characters had usually lacked, especially when played by non-Jewish actors.
Indeed it took a performer of immense charisma to eclipse the stereotype of the Jew as conniving and calculating, and of course with Shylock and Fagin obsessed with money too.
To be able to sing If I Were A Rich Man in a way that had audiences nodding with acknowledgment that they too had that wish, instead of in recognition that there goes another Jew banging on about money, spoke volumes about Topol’s ability to elicit empathy from his public.
It is worth mentioning here Ron Moody’s Fagin in Oliver!, the film of which was made three years before Topol made his career-defining movie (though three years after Topol played Tevye in London for the first time) did something similar.
Moody’s Fagin also had that humanising quality of sweetness (and was also Oscar nominated) and similarly to Topol’s Tevye, was a welcome balm for Jews used to seeing themselves represented as loathsome or irrelevant or both.
Although Moody would be associated with the Fagin role as much as Topol was with Tevye, for English speaking productions at least Moody was much the more diverse actor.
One example of this was when Topol was cast in the ill-fated West End show Ziegfeld in 1988, when he was brought in by producer Harold Fielding to save his disastrously received show about the American impresario.
But Topol could not master Ziegfeld’s American accent and so to compensate, an ingenious system was constructed involving a pop-up yellow rose in Topol’s button- hole which popped up when Topol was speaking as Ziegfeld and collapsed when he speaking as Topol the narrator. The show crashed anyway.
But even if it hadn’t it, would have been a footnote to his Tevye, which was embraced by audiences the world over.
Four months after that first London performance opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in February 1967, Topol left the show to return to Israel as the Six-Day War broke out.
When he returned a few days later, his first entrance on the stage was greeted by a standing ovation during which the audience reportedly cheered. Topol, the son of a plasterer on his father’s side and a seamstress on his mother’s, later said that he knew it was not him they were applauding but Israel, the country for which he often saw himself as an unofficial ambassador. News of his death at 87 was announced by Israel’s President on Twitter.
Topol was not a man known for his modesty but in that account, he was probably doing himself a disservice in that version of the story following the Six-Day War. True, Israel was viewed with more sympathy in back then. But no performer in the world was easier to love than Topol.
