Chaim Topol

Biography

In 1971 Chaim Topol was thirty-six, and on the set of “Fiddler on the Roof” make-up and costume made him look twenty years older and fourteen kilograms heavier. He explained that a young actor has to rein himself in: he cannot jump, he cannot suddenly be young, and his voice has to sound no longer young.

He had known the technique for a long time. At twenty-nine he had already played the sixty-year-old Sallah Shabati.

He was born on 9 September 1935 in Tel Aviv, then in Mandatory Palestine. His father, Jacob Topol, was born in Russia and came to the country in the early 1930s, worked as a plasterer and belonged to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization; his mother, Rel (Imrela) Goldman, was a seamstress. The children grew up in the working-class neighbourhood of Florentin. Chaim wanted to become a commercial artist, but his teacher, the writer Yemima Avidar-Tchernovitz, noticed a theatrical streak in him and gave him parts in school plays. At fourteen he began working as a printer at the newspaper Davar and studied in the evenings; at seventeen he finished school and moved to Kibbutz Geva. A year later he was drafted and joined the Nahal entertainment troupe, singing and acting in touring shows, and later became its commander. There he first played Sallah Shabati, in sketches by Ephraim Kishon. After his discharge in October 1956 he was almost at once called up as a reservist for the Sinai Campaign and performed for soldiers in the desert. He then settled at Kibbutz Mishmar David, worked as a garage mechanic and assembled a company of friends from the Nahal troupe: four days a week on tour, two days working on the kibbutz, one day off. The company lasted from early 1957 to the mid-1960s. From 1960 to 1964 he also performed with the satirical theatre company Batzal Yarok (“Green Onion”), whose members included Uri Zohar and Arik Einstein.

In 1960 Topol, together with Yosef Milo, became a co-founder of the Haifa Municipal Theatre, acting in plays by Shakespeare, Ionesco and Brecht. From 1965 he appeared at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv. He made his film debut in “I Like Mike” (1961), followed by “El Dorado” (1963). His breakthrough was “Sallah Shabati” (1964), after Kishon, a social satire about a family of Mizrahi Jews, immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African communities, in a transit camp for new arrivals in the 1950s. Topol proposed playing a general Mizrahi Jew rather than a Yemenite, and asked Kishon to change the recognizably Yemenite name Saadia to Sallah. For the role he received a Golden Globe as Most Promising Newcomer and the Golden Gate Award in San Francisco, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1966 he made his English-language film debut in “Cast a Giant Shadow”.

He first played Tevye in the Israeli production of the musical in 1966, for ten weeks, replacing Shmuel Rodensky, who had fallen ill. The producer Harold Prince, who had seen him in “Sallah Shabati”, invited him to audition for the London production, which opened on 16 February 1967 at Her Majesty’s Theatre. Topol’s English was poor, and he learned the score from the original Broadway cast recording. The director Jerome Robbins helped him strip the caricature out of the part. There were 430 performances in London in all, interrupted by the Six-Day War, when Topol served with an army entertainment troupe on the Golan Heights. It was there, in London, that he became known by his surname alone: the English producers could not pronounce the guttural “ch” of Chaim.

For the film version Norman Jewison looked for an actor other than Zero Mostel, who had made the role famous on Broadway: in his view, Mostel’s flamboyant manner would have overshadowed the character on screen. He chose Topol in February 1968. The film came out in 1971. Topol won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Spain’s Sant Jordi Award, Italy’s David di Donatello and an Oscar nomination, but lost to Gene Hackman for “The French Connection”. He went on to work in Israel and the United States: in “Galileo” (1975) he played Galileo, in “Flash Gordon” (1980) Dr Hans Zarkov, and in “For Your Eyes Only” (1981) Milos Columbo.

Tevye stayed with him for a long time: the London revival of 1983, the American tour of 1989 through thirty cities, the Broadway production of 1990–1991 at the Gershwin Theatre. For that he received a Tony Award nomination and lost to Jonathan Pryce in “Miss Saigon”. The farewell tour began in 2009; in Boston Topol withdrew because of a shoulder injury and was replaced by Theodore Bikel and Harvey Fierstein. He estimated that he had played Tevye more than 3,500 times in all.

In 1976 he played the baker in the musical “The Baker’s Wife”, but the producer David Merrick fired him after eight months; people involved in the production judged his work differently, and it is hard to check those judgements. In 1988 he played the title role in “Ziegfeld” at the London Palladium. In Hebrew he dubbed the panther Bagheera in “The Jungle Book” and Rubeus Hagrid in the first two Harry Potter films. He recorded several albums: songs from films, children’s songs and Israeli war songs.

He also drew: he illustrated about twenty-five books in Hebrew and English, and his portraits of Israeli presidents were issued as postage stamps in 2013. His autobiography, “Topol by Topol”, was published in London in 1981. In 1967 he founded Variety Israel, an organization for children with disabilities, and later became a co-founder and chairman of the board of Jordan River Village, a camp for Arab and Jewish children with life-threatening illnesses, which opened in 2012. In 2014 the University of Haifa awarded him an honorary degree, and in 2015 he received the Israel Prize. Chaim Topol died on 8 March 2023 in Tel Aviv. A memorial was held the day before the funeral at the Cameri Theatre, and he was buried on 10 March at Kvutzat Shiller.