Actor and singer, born in Vienna, Austria. He emigrated to Palestine as a teenager, acted in plays, then went to London where he studied acting and appeared on stage. He moved to the USA in 1954, made his New York stage debut (1955), and appeared in a few films before he was cast as the original Georg von Trapp in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music (1959). An American citizen from 1961, he appeared in revivals of such musicals as Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and Zorba (1968), and played character parts in many films. He also enjoyed a career as a folksinger-guitarist, noted especially for his renditions of Russian folk and Gypsy songs.
Theodor Meir Bikel (born May 2, 1924 in Vienna, Austria) is a Jewish character actor, folk singer and musician. 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. Bikel then went to his scheduled performance and became the first singer besides Dylan to perform the song in public.
In the early 1990s, he appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the episode "Family", playing Sergey Rozhenko, the Russian-born adopted father of Worf, who, as a petty officer on the Starfleet vessel Intrepid, had found Worf at the site of the Khitomer Massacre, and taken him home and to raise as his son. Bikel performed two roles in the Babylon 5 universe.
Other work
Bikel was president of Actors' Equity in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
Bikel's autobiography Theo was published in 1995 by Harper Collins, and re-issued in an updated version by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2002.
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