In 1959, he co-founded the Newport Folk Festival, and created the role of Captain von Trapp opposite Mary Martin as Maria in the original Broadway production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music.

In 1969, Bikel began acting and singing on stage as Tevye in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, a role he performed more often than any other actor to date.

[8] Finding work almost immediately, from the mid 40s to the late 50s, Bikel appeared in a slew of British B-movies, and the occasional 'A' film too, usually playing heavies and crooks of various European nationalities despite having perfected his English accent.

Despite his success in the UK, the ever-ambitious Bikel travelled to the States in 1954 to pursue his career in the more lucrative Hollywood movie industry and on Broadway, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1961.

Bikel wrote in his autobiography, Theo: "A few of my contemporaries regarded [not returning to Palestine] as a character flaw, if not a downright act of desertion.

"[10] 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, (England / United Kingdom).

[12] 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 case of flu.

[9] In movies, he played an Imperial German naval gunboat officer of the First World War era 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!!!

[9] 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.

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 Fiddler on the Roof) 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 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).

Murder Case"), Charlie's Angels, The San Pedro Beach Bums, Cannon, then back to family Western on Little House on the Prairie, and the long-running Gunsmoke.

International intrigue on Mission: Impossible, 1980s primetime soap opera Dynasty, the iconic '70s sitcom of All in the Family (1978), along with more police / detective dramas on 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 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.

He was able to sing in 21 different languages, including Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian, Hungarian, Romanian, French, medieval Spanish, Zulu, and English.

[23] In 1959, Bikel co-founded the Newport Folk Festival (together with Pete Seeger, Harold Leventhal, Oscar Brand, and George Wein).

[24][25] During an interview, when asked what inspired him to become involved in organizing a folk festival, he said that music was "one of the few answers to the chaos that we have," one of the only recourses to avoid social strife, and a means of giving youth hope for a better world.

[26] In 1963, Bikel joined Dylan, Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joan Baez for the festival grand finale as they sang "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome".

[23] Bikel (with business partner Herb Cohen) opened the first folk music coffee house in Los Angeles, The Unicorn.

Its popularity led to the two opening a second club, Cosmo Alley, which, in addition to folk music, presented poets such as Maya Angelou and comics including Lenny Bruce.

The producers stopped complaining, however, when after one show he was picked up backstage by a limousine carrying Eleanor Roosevelt, and he accompanied her to a Democratic rally as her special guest.

[34] In 1968, Bikel supported the presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy and attended the 1968 Democratic National Convention after being elected as a pro-McCarthy delegate in New York.

[39] Bikel died on July 21, 2015, at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles of natural causes, according to publicist Harlan Boll, survived by Ms. Ginsburg, his sons from his second marriage, Robert and Daniel, and three grandchildren.