At age 32, under Nazi rule, he was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp until he signed over his family's fortune for one Reichsmark.

After being deported from Switzerland for chess hustling, he went to Austria where Albert Einstein, a family friend, helped him immigrate to the United States.

[2][3] He worked as a janitor at Stanford University, where he demonstrated his prowess at chess by beating 30 professors simultaneously,[3] and later became a dockworker in San Francisco.

These were mostly small parts in B-movies, although he did provide the voice of Gollum in the 1977 made-for-television animated version of The Hobbit and the follow-up adaptation of The Return of the King (1980).

He was pulled out of retirement and booked by magician Dorothy Dietrich and Dick Brooks in the Magic Towne House on the affluent Upper East Side of Manhattan for special weekend midnight performances.

This resulted in a resurgence of interest in Brother Theodore that brought him success in his later years starting with Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show in 1977 followed by more TV appearances and movies.

[4] In an interview for MUM, The Society of American Magicians official magazine Dorothy Dietrich said:[5] Dick knew him.

Beginning in 1982, Theodore took up residence on Saturday nights for a nearly two-decade run at the 13th Street Repertory Theatre in Greenwich Village.

Just prior to his death from pneumonia, he recorded several monologues for the controversial documentary series, Disinfo Nation.

He appeared in Billy Crystal's mockumentary Don't Get Me Started and voiced the character of an ointment expert on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday version of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer in 1995.

Over the next 5 years Sumerel interviewed Dick Cavett, Eric Bogosian, Tom Schiller, Harlan Ellison, Len Belzer, Joe Dante, Mark Shulman, and Woody Allen, among others.

Sumerel spent the next two years gathering archival materials and working with editor Jeter Rhodes, to sift through the vast amount of content conveying Theodore's personal and professional life.The result was a non-traditional documentary titled To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore.

[7] The film was selected for premiere, February 13, 2008, at the opening night of the Museum of Modern Art's Fortnight Series.

His headstone reads: Known as Brother Theodore / Solo Performer, Comedian, Metaphysician / "As Long as There Is Death, There Is Hope" Theodore claimed on one of his David Letterman appearances that he had filmed a scene as a supermarket cashier in Leonard Part 6 starring Bill Cosby, but was fired after a day of shooting because he repeatedly mocked the star.