Theo: An Autobiography

Image Plates

Me at age two-Vienna, 1926. Maier Riegler, the Austrian prison warden: the grandfather who died before I was born. Reb Shimon Bikel, my sometimes irascible paternal grandfather, circa 1927. Three generations: my grandmother, mother, and 1. Mother and I in Vienna, about 1929. At the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1947, as Mr. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer. One of my earliest professional roles, in Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters, Tel Aviv, 1944. Same period, offstage. Reb Dovid Shapiro in Shalom Aleichem's It's Hard to Be aJew, Embassy Theatre Swiss Cottage, London, 1949. In London's West End, as Colonel Ikonenko in Peter Ustinov's The Love qf Four Colonels, one of my first major roles. A famous scene from The African Queen, when Bogart and Hepburn are about to be executed by hanging. I am on the left, and Peter Bull, playing the ship's captain , is on the right. In the J. Arthur Rank film The Little Kidnappers, I play the Dutch doctor, Willem Bloem. Same film; I am opposite Adrienne Corri, one of the few times I was permitted to be the love interest in a film. In what was to be the first of many supporting film roles, I played the first officer of a World War I German gunboat in The African Queen. Here, during a break in shooting, I am doing a bit of entertaining for John Huston, Humphrey Bogart (at right) and Katharine Hepburn (seated in the foreground with her back to the camera). In a scene from Desperate Moment, I hold a gun on Dirk Bogarde, an escaped convict. With Clark Gable and Richard Hayden (far right), I hold a gun on myself in a game of Russian roulette in the MGM film Never Let Me Co. A studio publicity shot from 1952. 1955. In my first U.S. stage role, I play Inspector Massoubre in Tonight in Samarkand, starring Louis Jourdan. One of my earliest television roles, playing Julius Caesar on the IM:stinghouse Summer Theater. My recording career had begun in earnest in 1956; here I am with conductor-composer Dov Seltzer. As Robert de Baudricourt opposite Julie Harris's Joan ofArc in the Broadway play The Lark in 1956. I am the strong yet benign Southern sheriff in The Diflant Ones. Unlikely casting, perhaps, but it got me an Academy Award nomination. As a stateless person stuck on a freighter and never permitted to leave the ship, in the U.N.-sponsored film VVl,V Has Seen the Wind during the early sixties. As Captain Von Trapp opposite Mary Martin in The Sound of Music on Broadway. As Zoltan Karpathy, the "hairy hound from Budapest," in the film version of My Fair Lady. 1960. On the campaign trail in New York's garment district with presidential candidate Senator John F. Kennedy and the celebrated New York labor leader David Potofsky (right). With Vice President Hubert Humphrey during the early years of LBl's administration; later things soured at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. With senatorial candidate Bobby Kennedy during his New York campaign. In Athens, interviewing the exiled Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus for my radio program, Theodore Bike! at Home. At this time I was on location shooting The Angry Hills. New York, 1963. Studying a page of Talmud with my father; my mother is proudly looking on. With schoolchildren at the Hollywood Bowl after a concert rehearsal: Bikel doing a "Pied Piper." As the hapless and lost Russian submarine captain in The R"'ssians Are Coming, The R"'ssians Are Coming. Campaigning for SANE in Nutley, New Jersey, in the mid-sixties. The best-and worst-was yet to come. In the Namibian desert, playing opposite a nameless giant lizard during the filming of Sands (if the Kalahari. As a Scottish gravedigger in I Bury the Living, who must kill to bring order to his cemetery. In a scene from Fox's The EIlc11lY Bclow. Here we are singing a song with skipper Curt Jurgens and the other officers in order to bolster morale during a depth-charge attack by an...