Theodore Bikel (Theodor Meir Bikel), (born May 2, 1924, Vienna, Austria—died July 21, 2015, Los Angeles, Calif.), Austrian-born character actor. folksinger, and political activist who created the role of Capt. Georg von Trapp (and received a Tony Award nomination) in the original Broadway production of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music (1959–63) and beginning in 1967 starred as Tevye the milkman in more than 2,000 performances of the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Bikel’s Jewish family fled to British Palestine following the Anschluss. He pursued an acting career on a kibbutz and then at the Hebrew-language Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv before studying (1946–48) at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His big break came when he was cast as the understudy for Mitch in Laurence Olivier’s 1949 West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Owing to his versatility and his talent for accents and dialects, Bikel portrayed characters of Russian, Dutch, Armenian, Greek, Italian, German, French, South African, and Hungarian ethnicity, and he received an Academy Award nomination for his role as a Southern sheriff in the film The Defiant Ones (1958). He also appeared on Broadway several times, earning his first Tony nomination (1958) for The Rope Dancers the year before he opened in The Sound of Music. He became a U.S. citizen in 1961. Bikel was an accomplished singer in a score of languages, though he was best known for his interpretations of Jewish folk songs, and he accompanied himself on the guitar in concerts and on some three dozen records. (Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the song “Edelweiss” for The Sound of Music specifically in order to exploit his skill.) Offstage he was a cofounder (1959) of the Newport Folk Festival, president (1973–82) of Actors’ Equity, and an outspoken supporter of Jewish causes and of human rights groups. Bikel wrote and starred in Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, a one-man stage show about the Yiddish writer whose stories formed the basis for