Spencer Tracy was one of the most beloved of American actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Spencer Bonaventure Tracy (April 5, 1900 – June 10, 1967) was an American actor. He was known for his natural performing style and versatility. One of the major stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Tracy was the first actor to win two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actor from nine nominations. During his career, he appeared in 75 films and developed a reputation among his peers as one of the screen’s greatest actors. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Tracy as the 9th greatest male star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.
Alan Mowbray was born in London, England. He served with distinction in the British Armyin World War I, being awarded the Military Medal and the French Croix de Guerre for bravery in action. He applied for transfer to the Royal Air Force, which was granted just six days before the war ended. This placed him in London on Armistice Day. His service came to an end when the Royal Air Force wanted another seven years from him
Mowbray began his stage career in London in 1922, as an actor and stage manager. In 1923 he arrived in the United States and was soon acting with New York stock companies. He debuted on Broadway in The Sport of Kings (1926); in 1929 he wrote, directed and starred in the unsuccessful Dinner Is Served.
Mowbray made his film debut in God’s Gift to Women (1931) playing a butler, a role in which he was thereafter often cast. In a contemporary pulp magazine story, Raymond Chandler lampooned Mowbray’s distinctive clipped speech in these roles: a butler is described as having “a wing collar and an accent like Alan Mowbray.”
Mowbray appeared in five more pictures in 1931, notably portraying George Washington in Alexander Hamilton. In 1935, he played one of the male leads in Becky Sharp, the first feature-length film in full-colour Technicolor, as well as playing the lead in the farcical Night Life of the Gods, based on a Thorne Smith novel. It was for another Thorne Smith–derived film, Topper (1937), that Mowbray may be best remembered; he played Topper’s butler Wilkins, a role he reprised the following year in Topper Takes a Trip. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Mowbray worked steadily, appearing in over 120 films including the Oscar-nominated My Man Godfrey (1937).
In the 1950s, Mowbray’s film roles decreased, and he began to appear on television. He played the title role in the DuMont TV series Colonel Humphrey Flack, which first aired in 1953–54 and was revived in 1958–59. In the 1954–55 television season, Mowbray played Mr. Swift, the drama coach of the character Mickey Mulligan, in NBC’s short-lived The Mickey Rooney Show: Hey, Mulligan. He portrayed the character Stewart Styles, a maitre d with a checkered past in the 1960-1961 adventure/drama series Dante, reprising a role he had originally played in several episodes of Four Star Theatre. Mowbray appeared in the titular role as a crooked astrologer in the 1959 episode “The Misfortune Teller” of the Maverick television series starring James Garner and Kathleen Crowley, and as Cranshaw in the episode “Quite a Woman” of the 1961 series The Investigators starring James Franciscus.
Mowbray was a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933, writing a personal check to fund the group’s incorporation and serving as the first vice president.
Mowbray married Lorraine Carpenter in 1927. Together they had two children, including daughter Patricia, who, at age 28 married her father’s friend, 70-year-old Canadian actor Douglass Dumbrille, in 1960.[7]
Unusually for a Hollywood star, Mowbray was less of a fan of seeing himself on the screen, but enjoyed working behind the scenes. In addition to helping found the Screen Actors Guild,[8] he was among the founders of the Hollywood Cricket Club. He was a prominent early member of the Masquers Club, and donated to the group’s long-time clubhouse at 1765 N. Sycamore Street in Hollywood. He also was a founder of the British United Services Club,[9] a club for ex British Military members in Hollywood that met at the Masquers.
Mowbray cooperated heavily with the FBI in the investigation of Japanese Spy Frederick Rutland, keeping it secret for the rest of his life, even though he ironically played a spy in the original The_Man_from_U.N.C.L.E.
Mowbray died of a heart attack in 1969 in Hollywood, survived by his wife and children. His body is interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
Larry Kert, the singer and actor who soared to fame in 1957 as the male romantic lead in “West Side Story,” died Wednesday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 60 years old.
He died of AIDS, a family spokesman said.
Mr. Kert, with his big, resonant tenor, captivated “West Side Story” audiences for three years with such compelling songs as “Tonight,” “Maria” and “Something’s Coming.” The explosive tale of star-crossed lovers doomed by prejudice, with its score by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins and book by Arthur Laurents, enthralled audiences in New York, London and on tour, and, later, in film and repeated revivals.
A decade later, Mr. Kert again triumphed on Broadway and in London in “Company,” interpreting Mr. Sondheim’s elegantly intricate musical exploration of urbane marriage and nonmarriage. He took over the central role from Dean Jones after only three weeks, led the long run and became the first replacement actor to be nominated for a Tony Award.
LA Times 7th June 1991
Larry Kert, whose soaring tenor voice gave the nation its initial glimpse of many of the melodic miracles of “West Side Story,” has died in New York of AIDS.
Kert, 60, died of the disease Wednesday at his home, said director Martin Charnin, who appeared with the actor in the landmark musical.
The musical retelling of “Romeo and Juliet” arrived at the Winter Garden Theater in 1957. Kert and Carol Lawrence played star-crossed lovers doomed by gang warfare between Anglos and Puerto Ricans.
Kert, with his appealing voice and sensitive stance, sang some of the most memorable songs in the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim score–“Maria,” “Tonight” and “Something’s Coming.” Advertisement
But Kert’s career faltered after that meteoric rise, and it was not until 1970, when he starred in “Company,” that the Los Angeles native returned to his early prominence.
Kert had been hired to understudy Dean Jones as the star of “Company,” Sondheim’s musical about marriage and bachelorhood in Manhattan.
After only two weeks, Jones left the cast, ostensibly for health reasons, but many said it was because of disenchantment with the play.
Kert was drinking a beer at a New York Knicks basketball game when he was told to rush to the theater.
He was nominated for a Tony Award for his subsequent performances, the only replacement actor ever considered for the prize. He toured with the play for several years.
Chicago Tribune 7th June 1991
Larry Kert, the singer and actor who soared to fame in 1957 as the young leader of the Jets gang in ”West Side Story,” died Wednesday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 60.
He died of AIDS, a family spokesman said.
Mr. Kert, with his big, resonant tenor, captivated ”West Side Story”
audiences for three years with such compelling songs as ”Tonight,” ”Maria” and ”Something`s Coming.”
The explosive tale of star-crossed lovers doomed by prejudice, with its score by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins and book by Arthur Laurents, enthralled audiences in New York, London and on tour, and, later, in film and repeated revivals.
A decade later, Mr. Kert again triumphed on Broadway and in London in
”Company” and was nominated for a Tony award.
NEWS Larry Kert; ‘West Side Story’ Star June 7, 1991 | BURT A. FOLKART, TIMES STAFF WRITER Larry Kert, whose soaring tenor voice gave the nation its initial glimpse of many of the melodic miracles of “West Side Story,” has died in New York of AIDS. Kert, 60, died of the disease Wednesday at his home, said director Martin Charnin, who appeared with the actor in the landmark musical. The musical retelling of “Romeo and Juliet” arrived at the Winter Garden Theater in 1957. Kert and Carol Lawrence played star-crossed lovers doomed by gang warfare between Anglos and Puerto Ricans.
Barbara Kingsbury was born in Bluefields, Nicaragua. Her mother, Florencia Carrera, was Nicaraguan, and her father, Louis Kingsbury, was an American who worked for the American embassy in Nicaragua.
Sometime after the age of ten, Carrera moved to the United States to live with her father. She moved to New York at the age of 15
Kingsbury began a career as a model at the Eileen Ford agency at the age of 17, at which point she changed her last name to her mother’s maiden name, Carrera. Her first film role was as a fashion model in Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), which fared poorly at the box office. In 1972, she appeared on the screen in a publicity role for Chiquitabananas. Carrera has appeared on the pages and covers of such magazines as Vogue, Paris Match, Harper’s Bazaar.
In 1989, Carrera starred with Bette Davis in Wicked Stepmother, Davis’s final film role. During filming, Davis fell ill and the script was rewritten for Carrera. “Instead, he rewrote the script to minimize Davis’ role as the wicked witch who marries into an unsuspecting family, becoming the children’s stepmother. In the original script, Davis was going to turn a cat into the beautiful Barbara Carrera. In the new version, Davis herself turns into Carrera, who assumes Davis’ lines for the bulk of the film.”
In 1997, Carrera was appointed Ambassador-at-Large for Nicaragua by then-president Arnoldo Alemán.[15]
Carrera is also a painter and her work has been showcased in the Makk Galleries, with Americo Makk, in Beverly Hills, Californiasince the 1980s, and the Roy Miles Gallery in London, England. In May 2002, her works were exhibited at the HollywoodEntertainment Museum.
Co-starring with Marlon Brando in his prime is a bonus for any actor’s filmography. The fame of Mary Murphy, who has died aged 80, was boosted considerably when she played his love interest in The Wild One (1953). Tame by today’s standards, it was the film in which the brooding, rebellious, black-leather-clad Brando, as the leader of a motorcycle gang, emerged fully as a sex symbol.
The pretty, clean-cut Murphy, never considered a sex symbol herself, served as an excellent foil to Brando who, when asked what he is rebelling against, replies: “What’ve you got?” As the sheriff’s daughter, she immediately attracts the attention of Brando when he comes in for a beer at the diner where she works. Gradually, the attraction becomes mutual as he rides his large, phallic motorcycle with her clutching his waist, her hair blowing wildly in the wind. Although their romance is doomed, her love for him is redemptive. Spared the dated 1950s slang (“crazy daddy-o”), Murphy perfectly portrays a “square” small-town girl whose suppressed restlessness is stirred by the forbidden encounter.
Murphy was born in Washington DC, spent most of her early childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, and her teens in California. While working as a package wrapper at Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, without any thoughts of an acting career, the 18-year-old was spotted in a coffee shop by a talent scout for Paramount Pictures.
While the studio put her through acting, singing and dancing classes, Murphy appeared in 11 Paramount films in bits or small parts, starting in The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), starring Bob Hope. “I’ll never forget that first picture,” Murphy said, “nor the one line of dialogue I had in it. The line was, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t got any change.'” She had a few more lines as Laurence Olivier’s daughter in William Wyler’s Carrie (1952).
Live Fast, poster, DIE YOUNG, Mary Murphy, 1958. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
It was only after she left Paramount that Murphy began to get leading roles, her first being in MGM’s Main Street to Broadway (1953). However, the flimsy central plot, featuring Murphy as an ambitious stage actor in love with an aspiring playwright (Tom Morton), was swamped by the film’s gimmick of having almost every star then working on Broadway make “in person” appearances. Nevertheless, she managed to land the role in The Wild One in the same year.
She found the film a learning experience because “Marlon didn’t always stay precisely to the script – and that was something I had always done. He’d sort of change the sentence structure of a line, maybe add or edit out a word here or there. That forced me to really listen, because I never knew for sure what he was going to say next.”
Now in demand, Murphy went on to star in four films in 1954, none of them particularly challenging. Beachhead, a tale of jungle warfare in which she was a plucky French planter’s daughter, making her way with US marine Tony Curtisthrough Japanese-held territory; The Mad Magician, in which she was the villainous Vincent Price’s stage assistant; Make Haste to Live, as the daughter of a woman in peril; and Sitting Bull, as the wife of an American major (Dale Robertson) seeking peace with the Sioux. It was during the filming of Sitting Bull that she and her brawny co-star Robertson became romantically involved. They married in 1956, but the marriage was annulled six months later because Murphy claimed her husband did not want children.
Meanwhile, Murphy was kept busy in television, predominantly as a guest star in western series such as Wagon Train and Laramie, and in features, the most prestigious being Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955), with Humphrey Bogartin gangster mode, threatening a middle-class family. Murphy, still young enough looking at 24 to play the spirited teenage daughter, is the object of desire of Bogart’s depraved younger brother (played by Dewey Martin).
Perhaps with The Wild One in mind, she was again cast as a teenager in Live Fast, Die Young (1958), billed as “the sin-steeped story of today’s beat generation”. Murphy’s penultimate film role before retiring was as the bitchy sister-in-law of a rodeo rider (Steve McQueen) in Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner (1972).
In 1962 Murphy married Alan Specht, the president of a chain of lighting stores. They divorced in 1967. Their daughter, Stephanie, survives her.
The above “Guardian” obituary can also be accessed here.
• Mary Murphy, actor, born 26 January 1931; died 4 May 2011
• This article was amended on 3 June 2011. The original stated that Murphy became romantically involved with Dale Robertson during the filming of Make Haste to Live. This has been corrected
Her film career began with an uncredited cameo appearance in From Hell to Texas (1958), a western with Dennis Hopper. In the early 1960s, she moved to Los Angeles and joined the UCLA Theater Group.
In 1983, Hartley reunited with Bixby in the sitcomGoodnight, Beantown, which ran for two seasons; the role earned her yet another Emmy Award nomination. (She would later work alongside Bixby again in the 1992 TV movie A Diagnosis of Murder, the first of three TV movies that would launch the series Diagnosis: Murder).
Chaim Topol (Hebrew: חיים טופול, born September 9, 1935), also known as Topol, is an Israeliactor, singer, comedian, voice artist, film producer, author, and illustrator. He is best known for his portrayal of Tevye the Dairyman, the lead role in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, on both stage and screen, having performed this role more than 3,500 times in shows and revivals from the late 1960s through to 2009.
He is a founder of Variety Israel, an organization serving children with special needs, and Jordan River Village, a year-round camp for Arab and Jewish children with life-threatening illnesses, for which he serves as chairman of the board. In 2015 he was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement.
The Boys Will Never Believe It, poster, (aka HA-TARNEGOL), Topol (center), 1973. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)
Topol was born on September 9, 1935 in Tel Aviv, in what was then Mandatory Palestine (now Israel). His father, Jacob Topol, had immigrated to Mandatory Palestine from Russia in the early 1930s and worked as a plasterer; His mother, Rel (née Goldman) Topol, was a seamstress. Although the young Chaim wanted to become a commercial artist, his elementary school teachers saw a theatrical side to him, and encouraged him to act in school plays and read stories to the class.
At age 14 he began working as a printer at the Davar newspaper while pursuing his high school studies at night. He graduated high school at age 17 and moved to KibbutzGeva. A year later, he enlisted in the Israeli army and became a member of the Nahal entertainment troupe, singing and acting in traveling shows. He rose in rank to troupe commander.
Twenty-three days after being discharged from military service on October 2, 1956, and two days after marrying Galia Finkelstein, a fellow Nahal troupe member, Topol was called up for reserve duty in the Sinai Campaign. He performed for soldiers stationed in the desert. After the war, he and his wife settled in Kibbutz Mishmar David, where Topol worked as a garage mechanic. Topol assembled a kibbutz theatre company made up of friends from his Nahal troupe; the group toured four days a week, worked on their respective kibbutzim for two days a week, and had one day off. The theatre company was in existence from early 1957 to the mid-1960s. Topol both sang and acted with the group, doing both “loudly”.
Between 1960 and 1964, Topol performed with the Batzal Yarok (“Green Onion”) satirical theatre company, which also toured Israel. Other members of the group included Uri Zohar, Nechama Hendel, Zaharira Harifai, Arik Einstein, and Oded Kotler. In 1960, Topol co-founded the Haifa Municipal Theatre with Yosef Milo, serving as assistant to the director and acting in plays by Shakespeare, Ionesco, and Brecht. In 1965 he performed in the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv.
Topol’s sketch of himself as Sallah ShabatiHaim Topol, then a young man and of Ashkenazi heritage, plays the old Sephardic manipulator with such consummate skill that even aged immigrants from Morocco and Tunisia were convinced that he was one of them.
Topol’s first film appearance was in the 1961 film I Like Mike, followed by the 1963 Israeli film El Dorado. His breakthrough role came as the lead character in the 1964 film Sallah Shabati. Adapted for the screen by Ephraim Kishon from his original play, the social satire depicts the hardships of a Mizrahi Jewish immigrant family in Israel in the 1950s, satirizing “just about every pillar of Israeli society: the Ashkenazi establishment, the pedantic bureaucracy, corrupt political parties, rigid kibbutz ideologues and … the Jewish National Fund‘s tree-planting program”. Topol, who was 29 during the filming, was familiar playing the role of the family patriarch, having performed skits from the play with his Nahal entertainment troupe during his army years.[3][10]He contributed his own ideas for the part, playing the character as a more universal Sephardi Jew instead of specifically a Yemenite, Iraqi, or Moroccan Jew, and asking Kishon to change the character’s first name from Saadia (a recognizably Yemenite name) to Sallah (a more general Mizrahi name).
Topol came to greatest prominence in his portrayal of Tevye the Dairyman on stage and screen. He first played the lead role in the Israeli production of the musical Fiddler on the Roofin 1966, replacing Shmuel Rodensky for 10 weeks when Rodensky fell ill.[3]Harold Prince, producer of the original Fiddler on the Roof that opened on Broadway in 1964, had seen Topol in Sallah Shabati and called him to audition for the role of the fifty-something Tevye in a new production scheduled to open at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on February 16, 1967. Not yet fluent in English, Topol memorized the score from the Broadway cast album and learned the lyrics with a British native. When Topol arrived at the audition, Prince was surprised that this 30-year-old man had played Shabati, a character in his sixties. Topol explained, “A good actor can play an old man, a sad face, a happy man. Makeup is not an obstacle”. Topol also surprised the producers with his familiarity with the staging, since he had already acted in the Israeli production, and was hired. He spent six months in London learning his part phonetically with vocal coach Cicely Berry. Jerome Robbins, director and choreographer of the 1964 Broadway show who came over to direct the London production, “re-directed” the character of Tevye for Topol and helped the actor deliver a less caricatured performance. Topol’s performance received positive reviews.
A few months after the opening, Topol was called up for reserve duty in the Six-Day War and returned to Israel. He was assigned to an army entertainment troupe on the Golan Heights. Afterward he returned to the London production, appearing in a total of 430 performances.
It was during the London run that he began being known by his last name only, as the English producers were unable to pronounce the voiceless uvular fricative consonant Ḥet at the beginning of his first name, Chaim, instead calling him “Shame”. Chaim Topol breathed life into Tevye.
In casting the 1971 film version of Fiddler on the Roof, director Norman Jewison and his production team sought an actor other than Zero Mostel for the lead role. This decision was a controversial one, as Mostel had made the role famous in the long-running Broadway musical and wanted to star in the film. But Jewison and his team felt Mostel would eclipse the character with his larger-than-life personality. Jewison flew to London in February 1968 to see Topol perform as Tevye during his last week with the London production, and chose him over Danny Kaye, Herschel Bernardi, Rod Steiger, Danny Thomas, Walter Matthau, Richard Burton, and Frank Sinatra, who had also expressed interest in the part.
Then 36 years old, Topol was made to look 20 years older and 30 pounds (14 kg) heavier with makeup and costuming.[5] As in his role as Shabati, Topol used the technique of “locking his muscles” to convincingly play an older character. He later explained:
As a young man, I had to make sure that I didn’t break the illusion for the audience. You have to tame yourself. I’m now someone who is supposed to be 50, 60 years old. I cannot jump. I cannot suddenly be young. You produce a certain sound [in your voice] that is not young.
In 1983 Topol reprised the role of Tevye in a revival of Fiddler on the Roof in West End theatre. In 1989, he played the role in a 30-city U.S. touring production. As he was by then the approximate age of the character, he commented, “I didn’t have to spend the energy playing the age”. In 1990–1991, he again starred as Tevye in a Broadway revival of Fiddlerat the Gershwin Theatre. In 1991, he was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical, losing to Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon. Topol again played Tevye in a 1994 London revival,which became a touring production. In that production, the role of one of his daughters was played by his own daughter, Adi Topol Margalith.
Topol reprised the role of Tevye for a 1997–1998 touring production in Israel, as well as a 1998 show at the Regent Theatre in Melbourne. In September 2005 he returned to Australia for a Fiddler on the Roof revival at the Capitol Theatre in Sydney, followed by an April 2006 production at the Lyric Theatre in Brisbane and a June 2006 production at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne. In May 2007, he starred in a production in the AucklandCivic Theatre.
On January 20, 2009, Topol began a farewell tour of Fiddler on the Roof as Tevye, opening in Wilmington, Delaware. He was forced to withdraw from the tour in Boston owing to a shoulder injury, and was replaced by Theodore Bikel and Harvey Fierstein, both of whom had portrayed Tevye on Broadway.Topol estimated that he performed the role more than 3,500 times.
In 1976, Topol played the lead role of the baker, Amiable, in the new musical The Baker’s Wife, but was fired after eight months by producer David Merrick. In her autobiography, Patti LuPone, his co-star in the production, claimed that Topol had behaved unprofessionally on stage and had a strained relationship with her off-stage. The show’s composer, Stephen Schwartz, claimed that Topol’s behavior greatly disturbed the cast and directors and resulted in the production not reaching Broadway as planned. In 1988, Topol starred in the title role in Ziegfeld at the London Palladium. He returned to the London stage in 2008 in the role of Honoré, from Maurice Chevalier‘s 1958 film Gigi.
Topol appeared in more than 30 films in Israel and abroad. Among his notable English-language appearances are the title role in Galileo (1975), Dr. Hans Zarkov in Flash Gordon(1980), and Milos Columbo in the James Bond filmFor Your Eyes Only (1981). He was said to be Israel’s “only internationally-recognized entertainer” in the 1960s through 1980s.
In Israel, Topol acted in and produced dozens of films and television series. As a voice artist, he dubbed the Hebrew-language versions of The Jungle Book and two films in the Harry Potter film series. He is also a playwright and screenwriter.
He was featured on two BBC One programs, the six-part series Topol’s Israel (1985) and earlier It’s Topol (1968). A Hebrew-language documentary of his life, Chaim Topol – Life as a Film, aired on Israel’s Channel 1 in 2011, featuring interviews with his longtime actor friends in Israel and abroad.
A baritone, Topol recorded several singles and albums, including film soundtracks, children’s songs, and Israeli war songs. His albums include Topol With Roger Webb And His Orchestra – Topol ’68 (1967), Topol Sings Israeli Freedom Songs (1967), War Songs By Topol (1968), and Topol’s Israel (1984). He appeared on the soundtrack albums for the film production of Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and the television production of The Going Up Of David Lev (2010).
His autobiography, Topol by Topol, was published in London by Weindenfel and Nicholson (1981). He also authored To Life! (1994) and Topol’s Treasury of Jewish Humor, Wit and Wisdom (1995).
Topol has illustrated approximately 25 books in both Hebrew and English.He has also produced drawings of Israeli national figures. His sketches of Israeli presidents were reproduced in a 2013 stamp series issued by the Israel Philatelic Federation, as was his self-portrait as Tevye for a 2014 commemorative stamp marking the 50th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Fiddler on the Roof.
In 1967, Topol founded Variety Israel, an organization serving children with special needs. He is also a co-founder and chairman of the board of Jordan River Village, a year-round camp for Arab and Jewish children with life-threatening illnesses, which opened in 2012.
Topol was a recipient of Israel’s Kinor David award in arts and entertainment in 1964. He received a Best Actor award from the San Sebastián International Film Festival for his performance in the 1972 film Follow Me! In 2008, he was named an Outstanding Member of the Israel Festival for his contribution to Israeli culture.
Topol died in 2023.
Guardian obituary:
Chaim Topol obituary
Israeli actor of stage and screen who made Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof his own
The musical had been premiered on Broadway in 1964, with Zero Mostel as Tevye. The book of Fiddler was adapted by Joseph Stein from the stories of Sholem Aleichem, the insinuating songs written by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock. A fount of Yiddish philosophy (“If you spit in the air, it lands in your face”), Tevye spoke directly to God in the Ukrainian village of Anatevka in 1905 – where, said the theatre critic Milton Shulman, the chief manufacturing goods were schmaltz and lumps in the throat – and came to represent the resilience of the Jewish people down the ages.
Topol (his name means “tree of life”), with his rich bass voice and instant rapport with the audience, was the icing on the strudel. He always deferred to Mostel’s genius as Tevye, and was surprised to be cast in the film. But he brought a passion and warmth to his signature role – which he played on stage in more than 3,500 performances, he estimated – that had possibly eluded the more clownish and hard-edged Mostel.
Topol returned to London in the role in 1983, and toured extensively in the US in the late 1980s, when Rosalind Harris, who played the eldest of his five daughters in the film, played his wife. He faced Broadway at last in 1990. When he played Tevye again at the London Palladium in 1994, he was still only 58. By then, the production and performance – enshrined by contract in Boris Aronson’s Chagall-inspired designs and Jerome Robbins’s brilliant but increasingly overfamiliar choreography – showed signs of creakiness. But Irving Wardle once again hailed Topol’s Tevye as “a living memorial to the comic genius of a tragic people”.
This version toured in Europe, Japan and Australia. Ten years later, Topol and Fiddler returned to Australia, as well as New Zealand, and a farewell American tour soon followed. He played Tevye for the last time in Boston, Massachusetts, on 15 November 2009.
His background had validated the performance. Born in Tel Aviv, Topol was the son of parents who had fled Poland in the 1930s – Jacob, a plasterer who had fought in the Haganah against the British in the war of independence, and Rel (nee Goldman), a seamstress. Like many Israelis of his generation, Topol served in the army in the Sinai campaign, in the six-day war in 1967 (he left the cast of Fiddler at Her Majesty’s theatre, London, for that campaign) and in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
In the army, Topol, who had two younger sisters, joined an entertainment troupe and then started his own satirical revue company, Batzal Yarok (“The Spring Onion” – “To convey the idea of something fresh, sharp and spicy,” he said). One of his fellow comedians was Galia Finkelstein, who shared his background in the Labour movement and whom he married at the Mishmar David kibbutz in 1956.
Topol first played Tevye in London in 1967 and reprised it on the West End in 1983. Photograph: David Thorpe/ANL/Rex/Shutterstock
Prior to his army service Topol had trained and worked as a printer after leaving school aged 14. He had never considered becoming a professional actor until, after a spell with the Cameri theatre in Tel Aviv, he joined the new Haifa municipal theatre in 1961. His leading roles there included Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Azdak in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and Jean in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which the playwright hailed as the best production ever of his absurdist, surreal play.
He was already well known for the character of Sallah Shabati, an immigrant weighed down with troubles and children who somehow overcomes all adversity. This dry run for Tevye featured in his army revues and a 1964 film (his third) that broke all box-office records in Israel and was nominated for a best foreign-language film Oscar.
International stardom followed in Melville Shavelson’s Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), a war drama about Israel’s struggle for independence, with Kirk Douglas as the American-born colonel David “Mickey” Marcus. Topol played an Arab sheikh, and underlined his versatility by playing a Russian deserter posing as a Slav interpreter in J Lee Thompson’s Before Winter Comes (1969), alongside David Niven, John Hurt and Anthony Quayle.
Still, when he came to London for Fiddler, he spoke hardly a word of English, and was tutored by the Royal Shakespeare Company voice coach Cicely Berry. He later embarked on a happy association with the Chichester Festival theatre, where he played Azdak again (completely bald) in 1969; the Peter Ustinov role of a match-making general in R Loves J, a musical version of Ustinov’s Romanoff and Juliet, with songs by Julian More and Alexander Faris, in 1973; and Othello, with Keith Michell as Iago, in 1975, presenting the tragic Moor, he said, as “a man of the desert, an Arab, blackened by the blazing sun”.
An attempt to follow the success of Fiddler with another musical scripted by Stein, this time with songs by Stephen Schwartz, The Baker’s Wife, foundered on the road and never reached Broadway. And his later film career never eclipsed Fiddler, though he appeared as Brecht’s Galileo in Joseph Losey’s 1974 memorial record of Charles Laughton’s version for the American Film theatre; as the scientist Dr Zarkov in Flash Gordon (1980); and as Milos Columbo, a roguish Greek turncoat, in For Your Eyes Only (1981), opposite Roger Moore’s James Bond.
Roger Moore and Topol in the 1981 Bond film For Your Eyes Only. Photograph: Cinetext Collection/Sportsphoto/Allstar
His television work included an incomplete project to film all the books of the Bible; The House on Garibaldi Street (1979), about the capture of Adolf Eichmann, with Martin Balsam and Janet Suzman; and the 1983 mini-series The Winds of War, and its sequel, War and Remembrance, in 1987.
Topol’s last appearance in London was in the autumn of 2008, when he played the Maurice Chevalier role of the old roue Honoré in a delightful revival of Gigi by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe in the Open Air theatre at Regent’s Park. As of old, he held the audience in the palm of his hand and discharged his two big numbers – Thank Heavens for Little Girls and I Remember It Well – with a laconic, sideways-on delivery and a generous dose of his trademark confidential charm.
His vivid autobiography, Topol By Topol, was published in 1981, and he compiled a treasury of Jewish jokes and wisdom, To Life! (1994), illustrating both books with his own deft line drawings.
Although he kept a house in London and travelled widely, Topol spent half the year at home in Tel Aviv. He helped to found the Jordan River Village, a holiday camp in lower Galilee for chronically ill children of all ethnic and religious backgrounds, which opened in 2012.
Galia and their children, Omer, Adi and Anat, survive him.
Chaim Topol, actor, born 9 September 1935; died 8 March 2023
Neil Leslie Diamond, (born January 24, 1941, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.), American singer-songwriter. He began his career writing pop songs for other musicians and then launched a solo recording career that spanned more than five decades.
Diamond’s interest in music began at age 16, when he obtained his first guitar. After graduating from high school, Diamond attended New York University with the intention of entering medical school. However, he left college during his final year to take a job as a staff songwriter for the Sunbeam Music Company. His tenure at Sunbeam was short, and he became one of a stable of songwriters who worked out of New York’s famed Brill Building.
In 1965 Diamond signed a recording contract with Bang Records, and one year later his debut album, The Feel of Neil, was released. Shortly thereafter he wrote the song “I’m a Believer” (1966), recorded and made famous by the Monkees. In 1967 Diamond signed a new recording contract with Uni Records, with whom he recorded such hits as “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show” (1969), “Sweet Caroline” (1969), “Cracklin’ Rosie” (1970), “I Am…I Said” (1971), and “Song Sung Blue” (1972).
After leaving Uni for Columbia Records, Diamond recorded the sound track for the film Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973), which earned him a Grammy Award. He went on to release a string of successful albums during the 1970s, including Serenade (1974), Beautiful Noise(1976), Love at the Greek (1977), You Don’t Bring Me Flowers (1978; featuring a duet with Barbra Streisand on the title track), and September Morn (1979).Get unlimited access to all of Britannica’s trusted content.Start Your Free Trial Today
In 1980 Diamond made his motion picture debut: he starred in a remake of the film The Jazz Singer, for which he also wrote and performed the sound track. Notable later albums include Heartlight (1982), Live in America (1994), In My Lifetime (1996), and The Neil Diamond Collection(1999). In the early 21st century Diamond released, among other albums, The Essential Neil Diamond (2001), Stages (2003), 12 Songs (2005), Home Before Dark (2008), and Melody Road(2014). He also made a cameo appearance as himself in the film Saving Silverman (2001). In January 2018, following a diagnosis of Parkinson disease, Diamond announced his retirement from touring.
Diamond was honoured twice by the Songwriters’ Hall of Fame—first upon his induction in 1984 and later in 2000, when he was presented with the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement award. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. That year Diamond also received a Kennedy Center Honor.
Actor Glenn Corbett died Jan. 16 in San Antonio after a six-month battle with lung cancer. He was 59.
An L.A. native, he attended Occidental College appearing in numerous plays and eventually made the move to the big screen essaying the role of Pat Garret in the John Wayne starrer “Chisum.”
Additional film credits included “Shenandoah,””The Mountain Road” and “Shadow Force.”
TV work included “Route 66,” when Corbett replaced George Maharis as the co-star of the series. He also had a recurring role on “Dallas” and when his character was eliminated from the story line, stayed with the production company as dialogue director. He held that position for three years.
He is survived by his daughter, Jocelyn, and son, Jason. Both live in Los Angeles.
Glenn Corbett with arms folded looking to his left in a scene from the film ‘The Mountain Road’, 1960. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)
