The intersection in front of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists headquarters has a new name Monday. It is Theodore Bikel Square.
Bikel’s widow, Aimee Ginsburg-Bikel, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Katy Yaroslavsky, who wrote the motion designating the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and South Curson Avenue in memory of the actor, folk singer, union president and activist, and City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson were among the speakers at the dedication ceremony Sunday at the intersection in the Mid-Wilshire district.
The ceremony comes in the year of the 100th anniversary of Bikel’s birth on May 2, 1924, in Vienna.
Bikel is best remembered for more than 2,000 performances as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” the most in the role, and portraying Captain von Trapp in the original Broadway production of “The Sound of Music.”
Bikel received Tony nominations in 1960 for best featured actor in a musical for “The Sound of Music” and in 1958 as best featured actor in a play for “The Rope Dancers.”
After fleeing Austria in 1938, the year it was annexed by Germany, for Palestine, Bikel began his acting career in 1942 as an apprentice at the Habimah Theater in Tel Aviv. He co-founded the Israeli Chamber Theater before leaving in 1946 to study at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
His early stage roles in London’s West End included “A Streetcar Named Desire” with Vivian Leigh, directed by her husband, Laurence Olivier, and “The Love of Four Colonels,” a fantasy written by and starring Peter Ustinov.
Bikel received his first screen credit as a German naval officer in the 1951 Humphrey Bogart-Katharine Hepburn film classic, “The African Queen.”
Bikel received a best supporting actor Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of a Southern sheriff who pursues escaped convicts played by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in the 1958 drama “The Defiant Ones.”
“While Tevye is extremely close to where I’m from, a Southern sheriff is extremely remote from where I am,” Bikel said in a 2005 interview with City News Service in connection with his receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“When (producer-director) Stanley Kramer offered me the role, I said, `Why are you offering me this? I’m not a southerner. I wasn’t even born here.’
“He said — and I’ve never forgotten it — `A good actor is a good actor is a good actor.”’
Bikel’s other film credits include “My Fair Lady,” “I Want To Live!” “Moulin Rouge” and “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” His television credits include “The Twilight Zone,” “All in the Family,” “Gunsmoke,” “L.A. Law,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Bikel sang in 21 languages, recorded albums in a variety of genres and founded the Newport Folk Festival with Pete Seeger.
Bikel was active in the civil rights movement for many years, a delegate to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 to the National Council on the Arts, president of the Actors Equity Association, the union representing the nation’s stage actors and stage managers, from 1973-82, and president of the Associated Actors and Artistes of America, the federation of trade unions for performing artists in the United States, from 1987 until his death in 2015 at the age of 91.