Chaim Topol
Topol spent four decades of his working life inside one part. The Israeli actor and singer estimated he played Tevye, the milkman of Fiddler on the Roof, more than 3,500 times on stage between 1967 and 2009, and he played him again in the 1971 film adaptation. Most actors would treat that as a trap. He treated it as a trade.
What he brought to Tevye, and to everything else, is a voice built for arguing with God: big, rough, amused, able to turn a complaint into a joke halfway through the sentence. The film is why the role belongs to him in popular memory, and it won him a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a musical or comedy, some years after the same awards had named him New Star of the Year.
The rest of his screen work traded on that weathered authority. He is Milos Columbo in the Bond film For Your Eyes Only, an ally rather than a villain, which is a much better use of him. He is Dr. Hans Zarkov in Flash Gordon, the only person on that gloriously silly planet playing anything straight. And he is Berel Jastrow across both of the enormous Winds of War miniseries, the character who carries the war's worst history through fourteen years of television. He died in 2023.
Movies (4)
TV (2)
Where to start with Chaim Topol
Fiddler on the Roof is not a suggestion so much as the whole reason to be on this page. Three hours in Anatevka, and Topol holds it together by playing Tevye as a working man arguing with his own faith rather than as a sentimental patriarch. Watch it before anything else on the list.
Then go sideways for the pleasure of it. For Your Eyes Only is one of the better late Roger Moore Bond films, and Columbo, all pistachios and warmth, is the best company in it. Flash Gordon is camp set to a Queen soundtrack, and Zarkov is the straight face that stops the whole thing floating off.
For the serious register, The Winds of War and its continuation War and Remembrance give him Berel Jastrow across two vast wartime miniseries, and that thread is the most demanding work he did. Cast a Giant Shadow is an early curiosity.