Theodore Bikel — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
Theodore Meir Bikel was born in Vienna on 2 May 1924, the son of Josef Bikel and Miriam, née Riegler. His father, an active Zionist, named him after Theodor Herzl, who had been born on the same date sixty-four years earlier. The family came from Bukovina, which until 1918 was a crown land of Austria, not of Russia, and Bikel had no ancestry in the Russian Empire. His connection is cultural: a career in which Russian and Russian-Jewish characters and songs held a central place.
After the German annexation of Austria in 1938, when he was thirteen, the family left for Mandatory Palestine, where his father's contacts helped them obtain British passports. He studied at the Mikveh Israel agricultural school and lived on Kibbutz Kfar HaMaccabi, and as a teenager made his stage debut in Tel Aviv in Tevye the Milkman, the stage version of Sholem Aleichem's stories about a dairyman in the Pale of Settlement. He then studied drama in London, where he had his first film parts in John Huston's The African Queen and Moulin Rouge.
In the United States, where he became a citizen in 1961, he received an Academy Award nomination for The Defiant Ones (1958) and in 1959 created the role of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music on Broadway; Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote "Edelweiss" for him. He was also a folk singer who recorded more than twenty albums and sang in twenty-one languages, among them Russian and Yiddish; his albums included Songs of a Russian Gypsy (1958). He was a co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival, dated to 1959 or 1961.
With a gift for accents, he was often cast as a Russian or a German. He played the Soviet submarine captain in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) and, in a 1990 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Sergey Rozhenko, the adoptive father of the Klingon Worf, described as Russian in his obituaries and as Belarusian-born by Wikipedia. He first played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof in 1967 and went on to perform the role more than 2,000 times, last in 2010, when he stepped in for an injured Topol on a North American tour. His obituaries called it more performances than any other actor; Topol is credited elsewhere with more than 3,500. At eighty-four he toured in his own one-man play about Tevye's creator, Sholem Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears.
He was president of Actors' Equity from 1973 to 1982 and of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America from 1988, and published his autobiography, Theo, in 1994. He died in Los Angeles on 21 July 2015, aged ninety-one.
"Born in Vienna; the family left for Mandatory Palestine after the Anschluss in 1938. He trained in London and settled in the United States, becoming a citizen in 1961."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Vienna (born); parents from Bukovina, Austrian before 1918 — no Russian Empire ancestry
No Russian ancestry: his parents came from Bukovina, an Austrian crown land before 1918. His connection is cultural: more than 2,000 performances as Tevye, the dairyman of the Pale of Settlement, a long run of Russian screen roles, and a repertoire of Russian and Yiddish song.
Vienna (born); parents from Bukovina, Austrian before 1918 — no Russian Empire ancestry. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.