Chaim Topol, who died this week aged 87, was best known for his starring role as Tevye in the classic stage musical Fiddler on the Roof and its 1971 film adaptation for which he was Oscar-nominated. The famous play follows a Russian Jewish milkman at the turn of the 20th century struggling to maintain his traditions as outside influences impact his family. The legendary Israeli actor would go to play the role over 3500 times from the late 1960s all the way through to 2009. This began with a Tel Aviv production before he was asked to audition for the 1967 West End production despite barely speaking a word of English at the time.
On first getting the West End leading role in his late twenties, Topol said: “I didn’t speak English and had a vocabulary of about fifty words – most of them swear words; but I managed to get by and I was told at the end of the day that the part was mine.” Yet three months into the run and war in the Middle East seemed very likely.
At the end of each performance, Topol would run to his dressing room to hear the news. Although his contract only included not having to work on Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur, he told the producer he needed to take leave and “fled” home to Israel.
Yet despite reporting for duty he didn’t know the war would only last six days and was back playing Tevye in London after only a week away.
Nevertheless, he remembered how at this time Israelis “suddenly began to think of themselves and speak of themselves as Jews… Jews who had seen Fiddler once came back to see it a second and third time, and some of the performances in June and July 1967 took on the character of a victory celebration.”
In 1971 a film version of Fiddler on the Roof was made and Topol managed to beat Frank Sinatra, Walter Matthau, Richard Burton and Danny Kaye to the part that would define his career. Yet incredibly when the star first saw the original 1964 Broadway production starring Zero Mostel he was disgusted by it.
READ MORE: Fiddler On The Roof review: No conflict here- just a damn good show
According to The Jerusalem Post, Topol wrote in his self-titled biography that he had been looking forward to being “in the presence of a genius” However, he felt Mostel was having an “off-day” as Tevye, making impromptu rude jokes by turning the village setting of Anatevka into “the shtetl Madison Avenue style.”
He described it as “reek[ing] both of the old golah (diaspora) as represented by the Russian Pale of Settlement, and the new one, as represented by New York: it seemed to reflect some of the worst features of both…” As for Topol’s overall summing up of Fiddler on the Roof after first seeing it on Broadway: “Ugh!” It wasn’t until he first saw the Tel Aviv production starring Russian Israeli actor Shmuel Rodensky that he was moved by the story and ended up taking over as Tevye having initially turned it down.
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