Originally divided by an interval, the second act brings only tragedy for Tevye, who faces the loss of his home to tsarist persecution and his two daughters to a new world. Indeed, it is Hodel’s farewell to “Far from the Home I Love” that moved Topol most. “She doesn’t speak, she just sings the song, and he understands every single feeling that she has. And he knows he won’t see her anymore.”
As the film’s emotional fulcrum, Topol’s portrayal of the pious milkman
has led people to ask about his real persona. “He doesn’t act, but lives the part and you can actually see his heart breaking,” says his youngest daughter, Adi, who played Chava with him at the Palladium in 1994.
hen the film adaptation of
Fiddler on the Roof opened, revered critic Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and said director Norman Jewison “has made as good a film as can be made from the material”. Ebert, now deceased, thought the storyline was “quite simply boring”, which decried the work of its original author, Sholem Aleichem, and raised doubts about Ebert’s Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
With global acclaim from all other reviewers, three Oscars, multiple nominations (including Best Actor for Chaim Topol) and a cumulative $83.3 million at the box office, the enduring appeal of this movie is irrefutable.
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A real Hollywood ending doesn’t always come from Hollywood; sometimes it comes from, gasp, the internet.
Or in this case, the Internet Archive, which has stepped in at the 11th hour to save the Michelson Cinema Research Library.
Lillian Michelson is Hollywood’s most famous and beloved librarian. Her marriage to late, great storyboard artist and production designer Harold Michelson brought her to Los Angeles in the late 1940s and eventually to Samuel Goldwyn Studios, where she began a lifelong career providing inspiration and information for all manner of filmmakers. Over the next half-century, she would build a cinematic research library second to none.
Courtesy of Internet Archive/Michelson Cinema Research Library (2)
Left: Lillian Michelson at work in the Michelson Library, Right: The roots of the library go back to the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios
“It’s not a library like you’ve ever seen before,” says Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, who tells THR he plans to both preserve and digitize the library, a resource for such films as Rosemary s Baby and The Birds
93-year-old Lillian Michelson has been helping Hollywood’s top filmmakers with their research since she began volunteering at the film library on Samuel Goldwyn Studios’ lot in 1961. Almost 60 years later, she is donating the Michelson Cinema Research Library which contains over 1 million books, images, maps, periodicals and more to the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization dedicated to building a digital library with universal access.