Theodor Meir Bikel (b. May 2 1924, Vienna, Austria) is an Academy Award-nominated character actor, folk singer and musician. He made his film debut in The African Queen (1951) and was nominated for an Academy award for his role as the Southern Sheriff in The Defiant Ones (1958).
He was the U-boat first officer to Curt Jürgens in The Enemy Below (1957) and played the captain of the Russian submarine in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966).
On Broadway he originated the role of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music in 1959. Since his first appearance as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof in 1967, Bikel has performed the role more often than any other actor (2094 times to date). Bikel was screentested for the role of Auric Goldfinger in the James Bond film Goldfinger(1964). The screentest can be seen on the "Ultimate Edition" DVD released in 2006.
Bikel was a co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival (together with Pete Seeger and George Wein) in 1961. In...
Created by dipity on Feb 7, 2008
Last updated: 03/11/10 at 10:56 PM
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The Return of the King is an animated adaptation of the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien which was released by Rankin/Bass as a TV special in 1980. It has since been released on VHS and DVD.
The film was created by the same team which had worked on the 1977animated version of The Hobbit.
Orson Bean returned as the voice of the older Bilbo Baggins, as well as that of the story's hero, Frodo Baggins.
John Huston was back as well, as the wizard Gandalf, and co-starring with them were: William Conrad as Denethor, Roddy McDowall as Samwise Gamgee, Theodore Bikel as Aragorn the King himself, and reprising his darkly spoken role of Gollum was the grumpily dangerous Brother Theodore. Rankin/Bass stalwart Paul Frees replaced Cyril Ritchard as the voice of Elrond; Casey Kasem, best known for his role as Shaggy in Hanna-Barbera's Scooby-Doo, was Merry with Sonny Melendrez as Pippin; Nellie Bellflower as Éowyn; and Glenn Yarbrough returned as principal vocalist, billed here as simply "the Minstrel of...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079802
Sweet November is a romantic drama originally released in 1968 and written by Herman Raucher. A remake of the original was released in 2001 under the same name.
Charlie Blake is a fanatical business man. He meets Sara, a woman very different from anyone else he has ever met. She beguiles him and convinces him to spend a month with her on the promise that she will change his life around.
The relationship builds between the two but it cannot last — Sara is dying and does not want to burden anybody as her condition declines. In an emotional end to the story she walks away from the relationship but her spirit has forever changed Charlie Blake.
...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063661
My Fair Lady is an Academy Award-winning 1964 film adaptation of the stage musical, My Fair Lady, based in turn on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. The film was directed by George Cukor and stars Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), an arrogant, irascible professor of phonetics, boasts to a new acquaintance, Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), that he can teach any woman to speak so "properly" that he could pass her off as a duchess. The person whom he is shown thus teaching is one Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a young woman with a horrendous Cockney accent who is selling flowers on the street. After overhearing this, Eliza finds her way to the professor's house and offers to pay for speech lessons, so that she can work in a flower shop. Pickering is intrigued and wagers that Higgins cannot back up his claim; Higgins takes Eliza on free of charge as a challenge to his skills.Eliza's father, Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), a dustman,...,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058385
I Want to Live! is a 1958 film which tells the "true" story of a woman, Barbara Graham, accused of murder, who faces execution. It stars Susan Hayward, Simon Oakland, Stafford Repp, and Theodore Bikel. The movie was adapted from articles written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Montgomery based on letters written by Ms. Graham. It was produced by Walter Wanger and directed by Robert Wise.It won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and nominated for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.Despite the epilog at the end of the film by Ed Montgomery that the film was factual - largely portraying Graham as innocent - there was substantial evidence to the fact that she was complicit in the murder. Hayward herself told Robert Osborne her research led her to conclude that Graham was guilty.Despite this, the film has endured as a little-known but well-loved classic, and earned...,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051758
The Defiant Ones is a 1958 film which tells the story of two escaped prisoners who are shackled together, one white and one black, who must co-operate in order to survive. It stars Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, Theodore Bikel, Cara Williams, Charles McGraw and Lon Chaney Jr..
The movie was adapted by Harold Jacob Smith from the story by Nedrick Young (originally as Nathan E. Douglas). It was directed by Stanley Kramer.
It won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White and Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Tony Curtis), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Sidney Poitier), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Theodore Bikel), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Cara Williams), Best Director, Best Film Editing and Best Picture.
Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, of the Our Gang comedies, has a small role. It was his last before his death.
The Defiant Ones was remade several times:
...,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051525
I Bury the Living was a 1958 horror film directed by famed b-movie director Albert Band, father of Charles Band, and starring Richard Boone and Theodore Bikel.Robert Kraft (Richard Boone) is the newly appointed chairman of a committee that oversees a colossal cemetery. The cemetery is so large that a map is kept in the cemetery office displaying the grounds and each gravesite. Filled graves are marked by black pins and unoccupied but sold graves are marked with white pins. New to the position and unobservant, Kraft accidentally places a pair of black pins where they don't belong, only to discover later that the young couple who had bought the gravesites in question died in an automobile accident soon afterwards. Under repeated tries, he finds that every time he places a black pin over an unoccupied grave, someone dies. Kraft slips into deep guilt and depression and believes he is cursed, while the cemetery caretaker (Theodore Bikel in a heavy Scots accent) knows more than he's telling....,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051755
The Pride and the Passion is an 1957 historical film drama made by Stanley Kramer productions and released by United Artists. It was directed and produced by Stanley Kramer from a screenplay by Edna Anhalt and Edward Anhalt and Earl Felton, based on the novel The Gun by C.S. Forester.
The film starred Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren with Theodore Bikel and Jay Novello. Set in the Napoleonic era, it is the story of a British officer who leads a force of Spanish guerillas hauling a huge gun across Spain to help in the capture of Ávila from the French, while evading the occupying French forces as well.
...,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050858
The Enemy Below is a 1957 war film which tells the story of the battle between the captain of an American destroyer escort and the commander of a German U-boat during World War II. It stars Robert Mitchum, Curt Jürgens, David Hedison and Theodore Bikel. The movie was directed and produced by Dick Powell. The film was based on a novel by Denys Rayner, a British naval officer involved in anti-submarine warfare throughout the second Battle of the Atlantic.The film received the 1958 Academy Award for best special effects.The movie revolves around a Buckley -class destroyer escort, USS Haynes (DE-181), and a German U-boat attempting to rendezvous with a German merchant raider in the South Atlantic Ocean. The Haynes is commanded by Captain Murrell (Mitchum), a former merchant marine sailor. Murrell engages in a deadly battle of wits with U-boat Kapitän von Stolberg (Jürgens). In the end, Murrell rams the U-boat with his ship.In the movie, pipe-smoking, chess-playing British captain Murrell...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050356
Theodore Bikel was born
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