Israeli actor Chaim Topol, famously known for his role as the milkman Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, has died at the age of 87, Israeli President Isaac Herzog announced on Thursday March 9, who hailed on Twitter the memory of a "giant of Israeli culture".
Born in 1935, he was revealed to the general Israeli public in 1964 by the film Sallah Shabati, a role which earned him a first Golden Globe (male revelation of the year) and consecration in his country. In 1966, he played a secondary role alongside Kirk Douglas in the Hollywood film The Shadow of a Giant and continued the following year on stage in London as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof after having played this role in Israel for several years. The film adaptation in 1971 of this musical counting the daily difficulties of a simple man in a "shtetl" (Jewish village in Eastern Europe) against a backdrop of rising anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia will bring him a second Golden Globe and an Israeli actor's first Oscar nomination.
He then continued his film and theater career with a notable appearance in 1981 in the James Bond For Your Eyes Only, where he played a Greek trafficker allied with a British spy alongside Roger Moore and Carole Bouquet.