He became famous in 1966 for playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, which role he performed some 1100 times in the Netherlands and in London.
At the time of his death, he had played the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof in more performances than any other actor, clocking over 2,000 performances as Zero Mostel's Broadway understudy, and later performing the lead role in his own right.
Tevye |
Ads portrayed Irgun fighters as "modern-day Nathan Hales," denounced London's policy of "taxation in Palestine without representation," quoted Thomas Jefferson's memorable phrase, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God," and used the motto, "It's 1776 in Palestine!" When Tevye speaks in his dream to the council of representatives of Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, he compares Palestine in the 1940s with the American colonies in the 1770s.
Amongst these works should be mentioned his cover and illustrations to the Jewish Folksongs of Dmitri Shostakovich (1977), illustrations to Aleichem's Tevye the Milkman (3 series, 1957–1966), The Enchanted Tailor (1954–57) and Song of Songs (1962), and a magnificent series of coloured lithographs (printed in London in 1961) on the old Jewish Passover song Chad Gadya (One Kid Goat).
He has translated Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman, and major Hebrew and Israeli novelists, among them Yosef Haim Brenner, S. Y. Agnon, Shulamith Hareven, A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and Meir Shalev.
His regional theatre credits include The Baker's Wife (Baker), Gypsy (Herbie opposite Betty Buckley), The Tale of the Allergist's Wife (Paper Mill Playhouse), A Class Act, Radio Gals (Pasadena Playhouse), Fiddler on the Roof (Tevye in six productions), Fiorello!, and She Loves Me (Reprise! L.A.).
The 2011 Festival presented three restored films: Lies My Father Told Me (dir. Ján Kadár), a 1975 film about a boy living in a Montreal Jewish community in the 1920s; the 1956 film Singing in the Dark (dir. Max Nosseck), one of the first American feature films to dramatize the Holocaust, starring Moishe Oysher as a concentration camp survivor; and the 1930 Tevye (dir. Maurice Schwartz), restored with new English subtitles.
She played Golde, Tevye's wife in a touring stage revival of the same musical nearly twenty years later with Topol, the Israeli actor as "Tevye".