Topol, actor who played the singing dairyman Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof – obituary

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.

Topol stumbled into musical stardom. 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. 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.

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.

Yet Topol hated it: “It was a matinée,” he recalled. “I can’t explain it, but Zero was going wild. 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 telegrammed back saying there was no way I wanted to be connected to that show.”

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. But when the teacher fell ill in 1965, Topol started understudying for four shows a week.

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. 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.

From 1967 the show ran for four years at Her Majesty’s to enthusiastic reviews. It was in London, too, that he became known simply as “Topol”. 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 his last month in the role in London that Topol was cast by Norman Jewison in the film. His performance won him a Golden Globe Award and a Best Actor Oscar nomination. He went on to reprise the role in theatrical productions in London, on Broadway and other locations around the world. 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.

Chaim Topol was born on September 9 1935 in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv. 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. They were the only members of his family to survive the war.

Topol left school aged 14 to become a printer. 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.

In 1956 he married Galia Finkelstein and moved on to her family’s kibbutz. Together they started their own satirical theatre group, The Spring Onions, which toured Israel entertaining the troops. When the group split up after four years he became assistant director of the municipal theatre in Haifa, where he made his professional stage debut as Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew and also appeared in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

His performance in The Taming of the Shrew led to parts in Israeli films such as I Like Mike (1961) and El Dorado (1963) before his performance in Sallah Shabati earned him the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year and led to the invitation to play Tevye.

After his triumphant four years in the role in London, for a while Topol declined invitations to reprise it elsewhere, not wanting to be Tevye forever.

However his appearance as Tevye brought roles in British theatre, with performances at the Chichester Festival, where he won acclaim as Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but earned mixed reviews as Othello, one critic complaining that he was so congenial as the Moor “we never ever fear for Desdemona”.

He turned down the role of Shylock, explaining that “at least in my eyes the character is written anti-Semitically, and there’s no doubt he’s the villain of the play... I’ve nothing against other people who want to play it, but I don’t feel I want to participate.” In 1988 he failed to rescue a disastrous Ziegfeld at the London Palladium after he was brought in to replace the leading actor.

On screen, Topol played the title role in Joseph Losey’s Galileo (1975), to mixed reviews, and also took small parts in Hollywood productions including For Your Eyes Only (1981), in which he played a Greek millionaire, and Flash Gordon (1980), in which he played the mad scientist Zarkov. On television he appeared in the epic American miniseries The Winds of War (as a Holocaust victim), and in Channel 4’s The House on Garibaldi Street, he played the Nazi hunter who tracked down Adolf Eichmann.

In 1982 he returned to the London stage as Tevye in a Royal Variety Performance described by critics as a genuinely electrifying experience, and the following year he took the lead in a revival of Fiddler at the Apollo Theatre.

In the late 1980s, by then the approximate age of his character, he played the role in a touring production in the United States. In 1990, he again played the part in a Broadway revival, and was nominated in 1991 for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical, losing to Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon.

He played the part again in a 1994 London revival, which became a touring production, sharing the stage with his actress daughter Ady, who played Tevye’s daughter Chava. After that he appeared in several more productions around the world, including stages in Europe, Australia and Japan.

Topol’s later film credits included Left Luggage (1998) in the role of Mr Apfelschnitt, and Time Elevator (1998) as Shalem. On stage in 2008 he played the role of Honore in Gigi at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park.

Throughout his career, Topol continued to serve for 42 days every year in the Israeli army until age made him ineligible. He served in the Six Day War of 1967 and was drafted again during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when he served as a liaison officer in the Golan Heights.

As he recalled in his 1981 autobiography Topol by Topol, the conflict zone provided the setting for a bizarre encounter with The Daily Telegraph’s redoubtable military correspondent, Brigadier WFK Thompson.

“There was a brief lull in the fighting and the reporters made a wild dash to file their copy,” Topol wrote, “but there was one man who would not be hurried, Brigadier Thompson, military correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph. Would I, he asked in the casual manner of someone suggesting a stroll in Hyde Park, care for a walk across the bridge? Shells roared overhead and exploded on every side. Bullets whistled about us and ricocheted off the sides of the bridge. When we came to the middle of the bridge Thompson asked, ‘Tell me, Mr Topol, did you enjoy Chichester?’

‘Chichester?’

‘The Chichester Festival.’

‘Ah, the Festival. Yes, very much.’

‘Lovely town, and of course it’s so near the Downs. Nothing more beautiful than the Sussex Downs on a sunny day. Unfortunately we do get rather a lot of rain...’

“The bridge over the canal was only 120 metres but that was the longest walk of my life.”

In later life Topol used the wealth he amassed during his career as an actor to build a holiday home for Arab and Jewish children with incurable illnesses. “It’s the most important thing that I have ever done,” he explained to an interviewer. “All the rest is little episodes.”

Topol is survived by his wife Galia and their son and two daughters.

Chaim Topol, born September 9 1935, died March 9 2023