Actor

Born: May 2, 1924;

Died: July 20, 2015

Theodore Bikel, who has died aged 91, was most celebrated for his work on the American stage - he was Captain von Trapp in the original 1959 Broadway production of The Sound of Music and he played Tevye in Fiddler of the Roof more than 2,000 times.

He also acted in well over 100 films and television shows and was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the southern sheriff pursuing a white man, played by Tony Curtis, shackled to a black man, played by Sidney Poitier, in the powerful 1958 racial drama The Defiant Ones.

He was born Theodore Meir Bikel into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1924. The family fled to Palestine in 1938 to escape the Nazis.

Captain von Trapp was not his only role as a German officer. Ironically for a Jewish refugee he carved out something of a niche for himself in Hollywood playing Germans, including naval officers in The African Queen (1951) and The Enemy Below (1957).

In the US he was also well known as a folk singer and political activist. He co-founded the famous Newport Folk Festival with Peter Seeger and various others and he helped the early career of a young folkie called Bob Dylan. He sang Blowin' in the Wind with Dylan when Dylan first appeared at the festival as a 22-year-old in 1963.

In his teens, Bikel began acting in Palestine and after the war he attended RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. Within a few years he was starring opposite Vivien Leigh in Laurence Olivier's West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He appeared at the King's Theatre in Edinburgh and Theatre Royal Glasgow in a touring production in 1950.

In the mid-1950s he moved to the US and The African Queen was one of his first films there. He had a talent for languages - signing folk songs in around 20 different languages, and also for accents, which brought him a string of film roles, including the language expert Zoltan Karpathy in the 1964 film of My Fair Lady.

But even Bikel had thought a Southern American sheriff might be too much of a challenge in The Defiant Ones. He told director Stanley Kramer: "I wasn't even born in America." He said Kramer replied: "A good actor is a good actor is a good actor." Bikel said he never forgot his words.

Bikel made guest appearances on many hit television shows, had a recurring role as an upper-class Englishman on Dynasty (1985) and played the adoptive Russian father of a Klingon boy on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1990).

He was married four times and divorced twice. He is survived by his fourth wife Aimee and two sons.

BRIAN PENDREIGH