News

Theodore Bikel. Theodore Bikel dead at 91: Oscar-nominated actor and folk singer best known for stage musicals 'The Sound of Music,' 'Fiddler on the Roof' Folk singer, social and union activist, and stage, film, and television actor Theodore Bikel, best remembered for starring in the Broadway musical The Sound of Music and, throughout the U.S., in Fiddler on the Roof, died Monday morning (July 20, '15) of "natural causes" at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. The Austrian-born Bikel – as Theodore Meir Bikel on May 2, 1924, in Vienna, to Yiddish-speaking Eastern European parents – was 91. Fled Hitler Thanks to his well-connected Zionist father, six months after the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 ("they were greeted with jubilation by the local populace," he would recall in 2012), the 14-year-old Bikel and his family fled to Palestine, at the time a British protectorate. While there, the teenager began acting on stage,...

Prolific stage and screen actor Theodore Bikel has died, aged 91.

Bikel passed away at UCLA Medical Centre in Los Angeles of natural causes earlier today (July 21), according to The Hollywood Reporter.

His long stage career included originating the role of Captain von Trapp and earning a Tony nomination for The Sound of Music, and having had the most public performances as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof with 2,200 between 1967 and 2010.

On the big screen, he played the dialect coach Zoltan in My Fair Lady and earned an Academy Award nomination for The Defiant Ones.

He founded the legendary Newport Folk Festival with Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand and George Wein, launched the Actors Federal Credit Union and later became a champion of civil rights in the Us.

Bikel is survived by wife Aimee Ginsburg and two kids.

Speaking at the Shanghai International Film Festival, Im Global chief Stuart Ford predicted that China digital and pay-tv revenues could become the biggest driver of the global movie market within five years.

Ford was delivering a keynote conversation at the Winston Baker Film Finance China conference (June 16), part of the Siff Forum series of panel discussions and talks.

“You don’t need to be a soothsayer to say that five years from now, digital and pay-tv revenues in China will be the single biggest revenue stream of any movie globally,” said Ford when asked about the entrance of Bat (Chinese tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) into the China film market.

When asked if that revenue stream would be bigger than Us theatrical, Ford replied: “Yes, in due course, and certainly more cost effective. It’s hard to see how the people who are paying that kind of money for content won’t have a hand in controlling...