Actor
In 1948, Michael Redgrave recommended Bikel to his friend Laurence Olivier as understudy for the parts of both Stanley Kowalski and Harold "Mitch" Mitchell in the West End theatre district premiere of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in London. Aside from being an understudy, Bikel's main role in the production was the relatively minor part of Pablo Gonzales. He graduated from supporting actor and understudy, though, to star opposite the director's wife, Vivien Leigh, with a sudden, unplanned performance when a co-star, playing the role of Mitch, came down with a minor illness. Bikel showed up backstage and went directly to Leigh's dressing room to ask if she wanted to rehearse with him, to make sure he was right for the role. She replied that she did not need to: "Go and do it," she said. "You are a professional, and Larry gave you this job because he trusted you to do it well." After the show, Leigh told him, "Well done."
For most of his acting career, he was known for his versatility in playing characters of different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds; he claimed he took on those different personalities so his acting would "never get stale". On television, he played an Armenian merchant on Ironside, a Polish professor on Charlie's Angels, a tyrannical American law school professor on The Paper Chase (television version of the earlier feature film The Paper Chase (1973), starring John Houseman as Professor Kingsley), a Bulgarian villain on Falcon Crest, a Belarusian on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and an Italian on Murder, She Wrote.
In movies, he played an Imperial German naval gunboat officer in the First World War in The African Queen (1951) opposite Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn and in the World War II combat film on a Nazi German U-boat / submarine in The Enemy Below (1957) starring Robert Mitchum and Curd Jürgens, a Southern "redneck" sheriff chasing two chained escaped convicts Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, and a Russian submarine captain whose boat gets grounded on the beach near the rural village on Gloucester Island of the New England rocky coast causing residents to panic of a threatening Russian Soviet Union / Red Navy invasion in the Cold War era comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!!! (1966), along with Alan Arkin, Brian Keith, Jonathan Winters and Carl Reiner. He also portrayed the sadistic General Jouvet in The Pride and the Passion (1957), and was screen tested for the role of Auric Goldfinger in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964), though the part ultimately went to German actor Gert Fröbe. In My Fair Lady (1964), he played the overbearing Hungarian linguist Zoltan Karpathy.
He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in Tonight in Samarkand, and in 1958 was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for The Rope Dancers. In 1959, he created the role of Austria-Hungary Empire naval Captain von Trapp in the original stage musical production of The Sound of Music, which earned him a second "Tony" nomination. Bikel did not like his role because his ability to sing was underused; neither did he enjoy performing the role of the captain repeatedly. When the famous longtime musical composers Rodgers and Hammerstein realized Bikel was an accomplished folk singer, they wrote the song "Edelweiss" (purporting within the story to be an Austrian folk song) specifically for him to sing and accompany himself on the guitar.
In 1964, he played Zoltan Karpathy, the dialect expert, in the film version of My Fair Lady. Since his first appearance as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1967), Bikel had performed the role more often than any other actor (over 2,000 times). When an injury required 74-year-old fellow Israeli performer Chaim Topol (veteran of many productions of the stage show and star of the later 1967 motion picture version) to withdraw from a high-budget, much-promoted 2009 North American tour of the revival musical, Bikel substituted for him in several appearances in 2010.
Bikel was a guest star on many popular television series in the 1950s (often called the first "Golden Age of Television"). He appeared in an episode of the 1954 NBC legal drama Justice based on cases from the Legal Aid Society of New York. He also appeared in the episode entitled "The Faithful Pilgrimage" of CBS's Appointment with Adventure anthology series. That particular episode was written by Rod Serling. He also appeared in a second episode of Appointment with Adventure entitled "Return of the Stranger". Bikel also appeared in an acting role in Frank Zappa's experimental film 200 Motels (1971).
Bikel continued guest-starring in the following decades of the 1960s and 1970s, beginning on Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (episode "Four O'Clock" as Oliver Crangle). He appeared on episodes of the Western series of Wagon Train, and the World War II drama Combat! in the season-three episode "Mountain Man" as Francois Perrault. He followed these with roles in the police dramas Hawaii Five-O, Columbo (1977, "The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case"), Charlie's Angels, The San Pedro Beach Bums, Cannon, and in Little House on the Prairie, and the long-running western series Gunsmoke. Bikel also acted in the international intrigue series Mission: Impossible, the 1980s primetime soap opera Dynasty, the iconic '70s sitcom of All in the Family (1978), and further police/detective dramas in the forms of Knight Rider; Murder, She Wrote; Law & Order; and Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (1987 episode "Elegy for a Tramp" as Gerringer).
In the early 1990s, he appeared on the science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation, in the episode "Family", playing Sergey Rozhenko, Worf's Belarusian-born adoptive father. Bikel continued in the sci-fi genre with performing two roles in the Babylon 5 universe, in 1994 as Rabbi Koslov in the first-season episode "TKO" and in 1998, as Ranger leader Lenonn in the TV movie Babylon 5: In the Beginning.
Bikel was nominated for the Drama Desk Award in 2010 for outstanding solo performance for Sholom Aleichem: Laughter Through Tears, an off-Broadway play that he also wrote. In 2012, Bikel played the title role in Visiting Mr. Green with the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company in Toronto, Canada. In 2013, Bikel starred in Journey 4 Artists, a documentary that celebrates the power of music and religious diversity.
