Topol, the Israeli actor who in his late 20s took on the role of the patriarch Tevye — the soulful shtetl milkman at the centre of Fiddler on the Roof — and reprised the role for decades, has died. He was 87.

His death was announced by President Isaac Herzog of Israel on Twitter on Thursday.

Herzog did not give a time or cause of death. Topol — born Chaim Topol, he used only his surname throughout much of his professional life — came to wide international renown as the star of the 1971 film version of Fiddler.

Its director, Norman Jewison, had chosen Topol, then a little-known stage actor, over Zero Mostel, who had created the part on Broadway. The film, for which Topol earned an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award, made him a star.

For much of the late 20th century, he would be, in the words of The Jerusalem Post in 2012, “Israel’s most famous export since the Jaffa orange.”

Topol reprised Tevye in stage productions worldwide for decades, including a 1990 Broadway revival for which he received a Tony nomination.

By 2009, he had, by his own estimate, played the character more than 3,500 times. His other film appearances include the title role in Galileo, the director Joseph Losey’s 1975 adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s stage play, Flash Gordon (1980), in which he portrayed the scientist Hans Zarkov; and the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (1981), starring Roger Moore, in which he played the Greek smuggler Milos Columbo.

On television, he played the Polish Jew, Berel Jastrow, in the 1983 mini-series The Winds of War, reprising the role for its sequel, War and Remembrance, broadcast from 1988 to 1989. But it was for Tevye — the weary, tradition-bound Everyman who argues with God, bemoans his lot as the penurious father of five daughters and lives warily amid the pogroms of early-20th-century Czarist Russia — that Topol remained best known.

“Like Yul Brynner in The King and I and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Topol has become almost synonymous with his character,” the news service United Press International said in 1989.

Over the years, Topol was asked repeatedly whether he ever tired of playing the role. “Let’s face it, it’s one of the best parts ever written for a male actor in the musical theatre,” he told The Boston Globe in 1989 when he had played Tevye a mere 700 times or so.

“It takes you to a wide range of emotions, happiness to sadness, anger to love.”

New York Times News Service