How Topol made the ‘too ethnic’ Fiddler On The Roof sing
During the course of a long and distinguished career on stage and screen, the Israeli actor Chaim Topol, who has died at the age of 87, was famous for any number of iconic performances. He was Dr Hans Zarkov in Mike Hodges’s deliriously camp space opera Flash Gordon – his character even being namechecked in the Queen single that accompanied the film – and played 007’s wily ally Milos Columbo in the grittiest entry in the Roger Moore Bond canon, For Your Eyes Only.
Yet it was inevitable that, when his death was announced, every single news story and obituary would lead with his most famous role: that of Tevye the Dairyman in Fiddler on the Roof, the part that he became synonymous with.
Despite many other actors taking on the character to great acclaim – most recently Andy Nyman, who played Tevye in a 2019 production directed by Trevor Nunn – there can be no doubt that it was Topol’s signature role, and one that he remained proud of all his life. The part of a downtrodden Ukrainian milkman who has both conservative religious views and five wilful daughters – the two often coming into conflict with one another – was rich in both comedy and pathos, and a gift for any actor.
In 2015, he said to the Times of Israel: “How many people are known for one part? How many people in my profession are known worldwide? So I am not complaining. Sometimes I am surprised when I come to China or when I come to Tokyo or when I come to France or when I come wherever and the clerk at the immigration says ‘Topol, Topol, are you Topol?’ So yes many people saw [Fiddler] and it is not a bad thing.”
He first played the role of Tevye in 1966 in its debut Israeli production, after the actor Zero Mostel had created the part in its Broadway debut in 1964. Topol – who was usually only known by his surname throughout his career – was by no means a household name at that point, unlike the ebullient Mostel.
He had begun acting in the Fifties, performing with a kibbutz theatre company and, in his words, singing and acting “loudly”. His charismatic and outgoing performances brought him to the attention firstly of Israeli theatre producers and then to filmmakers, and his breakthrough role in the film Sallah Shabati in 1964, in which the then 29-year-old actor played a beleaguered Jewish patriarch under heavy make-up, directly led to his being cast opposite Kirk Douglas in the biopic of the Jewish-American military officer David ‘Mickey’ Marcus, Cast a Giant Shadow.
Although his appearance as Abou Idn Kader was not a pivotal one, it nevertheless established Topol as a recognisable international name, and so when the actor Shmuel Rodensky, who had been playing Tevye in the stage production of Fiddler on the Roof in Tel Aviv, fell ill, Topol replaced him for a 10-week period to great acclaim.
When the impresario Harold Prince, who had successfully produced the play on Broadway (despite reluctant backers who considered the play “too ethnic”), was looking for an actor for the West End staging in 1967, his first thought was to cast the star of both Sallah Shabati and the Israeli version of Fiddler. However, Topol was both unable to speak fluent English and, at 30, apparently too young for the part as written. (Mostel had been 49 when he played Tevye.)
He learnt the role by listening to the Broadway cast recording consistently and by practicing the lyrics with a British friend, but trusted in his versatility in order to be able to play the part, saying: “A good actor can play an old man, a sad face, a happy man. Makeup is not an obstacle.”
Topol was amused to find that the British producers could not pronounce his first name, and so instead referred to him as ‘Shame’. The production was overseen by the Broadway director Jerome Robbins, who directed the first staging, and now revisited the play to make it more naturalistic and less caricatured; it proved a notable hit, and even Topol’s being summoned back to Israel to serve on reserve duty in the Six-Day War of 1967 – where he entertained the troops, rather than engage in fighting – could not derail his newfound success.
He would eventually play the part four separate times on stage; on Broadway in 1990 and in the West End in 1967, 1983 and 1994. In the last production, Topol, by now aged 61, no longer needed the heavy make-up that he had required as a younger man to age convincingly, and joyfully reprised Tevye to critical acclaim and sold-out audiences.
A great deal of the ongoing affection for Topol, and for Fiddler, lay with Norman Jewison’s 1971 film adaptation of the musical. Jewison was an unorthodox choice for director, given that his metier was slick, stylish crime dramas such as the Sidney Poitier vehicle In The Heat of the Night and the Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway caper The Thomas Crown Affair. Nor, despite his name, was he himself Jewish; his family were English Protestants who had settled in America several generations before. When offered the chance to direct by the studio head, his first reaction was to say “But I’m a goy!”
However, this sense of disassociation made him well-suited to the material, given that Fiddler is all about displacement and bidding farewell to one’s homeland: a resonance, given the current situation in Ukraine, that makes it all the more topical, and affecting, today.
Despite its reputation as a jolly, knees-up musical, with its most famous songs including Tevye’s solo If I Were A Rich Man and the ensemble number Sunrise, Sunset, it has a dark, at times almost tragic core that Jewison was wholly attuned to. He vetoed the casting of Mostel as “too stagey, too Brooklyn, too American”, and insisted on the more authentic Topol, who he considered more naturalistic, even if he, too, had to tone down his exuberant stage antics for the screen. Ageing him proved not to be a problem; as the actor subsequently said: “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 [vocal] sound that is not young.”
A budget of $9 million was agreed upon – reasonably low for a musical (the recent Funny Girl had cost $14 million), but a reflection of the absence of big-name stars and a three-hour length. It was shot on location in Yugoslavia, recreating the turn-of-the-century Russian shtetls that the story was set in, and Jewison insisted on authenticity at all times, even when the interior shots were filmed in Pinewood Studios. Extras were flown in who could speak the authentic Eastern European languages of the setting and even geese and pigs were imported to make the whole thing feel naturalistic, rather than the studio-bound antics of Oliver!
He succeeded admirably. When the film was released at the end of 1971, it was a critical and commercial hit, and Topol won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy; he was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Gene Hackman in The French Connection.
And since then, it has become not only a mainstay of musical cinema, but a testament to the humanity of its star, who anchors the picture with both heart and humour. It may have been the role that he was associated with for the rest of his life, but it is impossible to hear If I Were a Rich Man without thinking of Topol, and the certain knowledge that this iconic performance remains one of the most joyful that any actor gave in 20th-century cinema.
