Topol

Chaim Topol, known professionally as Topol, was an Israeli actor and singer born on September 9, 1935, in Tel Aviv, in what was then Mandatory Palestine. He died on March 8, 2023, at the age of 87. His father Jacob, originally from Russia, immigrated to Palestine in the early 1930s and worked as a plasterer while also serving in the Haganah paramilitary organization. His mother, Imrela "Rel" Goldman Topol, was a seamstress. Topol and his two younger sisters were raised in Florentin, a working-class neighborhood in South Tel Aviv. As a child he aspired to become a commercial artist, but his elementary school teacher, the writer Yemima Avidar-Tchernovitz, recognized his theatrical aptitude and encouraged him to perform in school plays. At fourteen he took a job as a printer at Davar newspaper while completing his secondary education at night, graduating at seventeen before moving to Kibbutz Geva.

Topol's performing career began during his Israeli army service, when he joined the Nahal entertainment troupe, singing and acting in traveling shows and eventually rising to the rank of troupe commander. Twenty-three days after his discharge on October 2, 1956, and two days after marrying fellow troupe member Galia Finkelstein, he was called up for reserve duty in the Sinai Campaign and performed for soldiers in the desert. Following the war, he and his wife settled at Kibbutz Mishmar David, where he worked as a garage mechanic and assembled a kibbutz theatre company from former Nahal colleagues. The group toured four days a week from early 1957 through the mid-1960s. Between 1960 and 1964, Topol also performed with the Batzal Yarok satirical theatre company alongside Uri Zohar, Nechama Hendel, Arik Einstein, and Oded Kotler, among others. In 1960, he co-founded the Haifa Municipal Theatre with Yosef Milo, serving as assistant to the director and acting in works by Shakespeare, Ionesco, and Brecht. In 1965 he performed at the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv.

His film career began with the 1961 Israeli production I Like Mike, followed by the 1963 film El Dorado. His breakthrough came with the 1964 film Sallah Shabati, written by Ephraim Kishon, in which Topol played the lead role of a Sephardic immigrant patriarch navigating the hardships of Israel's immigrant absorption camps. Topol, then twenty-nine, contributed to shaping the character, choosing to portray him as a more universal Mizrahi Jew rather than one of a specific ethnic background, and persuading Kishon to change the character's first name from Saadia to Sallah. The film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. For his performance, Topol received the 1964 Golden Gate Award for Best Actor at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the 1965 Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer—Male, shared with Harve Presnell and George Segal. In 1966, he made his English-language film debut in Cast a Giant Shadow, a biopic about Mickey Marcus, playing the character Abou Ibn Kaqden.

Topol became most widely recognized for his portrayal of Tevye the Dairyman in Fiddler on the Roof. He first played the role in 1966 in an Israeli production, stepping in for Shmuel Rodensky for ten weeks while Rodensky was ill. Harold Prince, producer of the original 1964 Broadway production, had seen Topol in Sallah Shabati and invited him to audition for 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 original Broadway cast album and worked on the lyrics with a native English speaker. He then spent six months in London learning his part phonetically with vocal coach Cicely Berry. Jerome Robbins, who had directed and choreographed the original Broadway production, came to London to direct the new staging and worked with Topol to develop a less caricatured interpretation of Tevye. Topol estimated that he played the role more than 3,500 times on stage between 1967 and 2009. He also portrayed Tevye in the 1971 film adaptation, for which he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Topol's Broadway career spanned from 1989 to 2009, with his work in Fiddler on the Roof earning him a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical in 1991. His screen work extended well beyond his Tevye performances, encompassing more than thirty films in Israel and the United States, including Galileo in 1975, Flash Gordon in 1980, and the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only in 1981.

Beyond his performing career, Topol was a founder of Variety Israel, an organization serving children with special needs, and of Jordan River Village, a year-round camp for Arab and Jewish children with life-threatening illnesses, for which he served as chairman of the board. In 2015, he received the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement. Topol and his wife Galia had three children: a son, Omer, and two daughters, Anat and Adi. His granddaughter through Adi, Yali Topol Margalith, is also an actress. In June 2022, his son Omer disclosed that Topol had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. A memorial was held at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv on March 10, 2023, the day before his burial at Kvutzat Shiller.