Chaim Topol, the Israeli actor who took on the role of the patriarch Tevye, the soulful shtetl milkman at the center of “Fiddler on the Roof,” in his late 20s and reprised the role for decades, died at his home in Tel Aviv. He was 87.

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, “Israel’s most famous export since the Jaffa orange.”

His other films include “Galileo” (1975), “Flash Gordon” (1980), and the James Bond film “For Your Eyes Only” (1981), in which he played the Greek smuggler Milos Columbo.

On television, Topol played the Polish Jew Berel Jastrow in the 1983 mini-series “The Winds of War” and reprised the role for its sequel, “War and Remembrance,” broadcast in 1988 and 1989.

But it was indisputably for Tevye — the weary, tradition-bound Everyman who argues with God, bemoans his lot as the penurious father of five daughters and lives increasingly wary of the elite in early-20th-century Czarist Russia — that Topol remained best known.

Topol stated:

“Let’s face it, it’s one of the best parts ever written for a male actor in the musical theater,” 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.”

"I did ‘Fiddler’ a long time thinking that this was a story about the Jewish people,” he said in a 2009 interview. “But now I’ve been performing all over the world. And the fantastic thing is wherever I’ve been — India, Japan, England, Greece, Egypt — people come up to me after the show and say, ‘This is our story as well.’”

His laurels included the Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honor, which he received in 2015. The recognition came both for his acting and for his charitable work, notably helping to found Jordan River Village, a holiday camp in Israel for seriously ill children from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

 Topol will always be known for his “rough presence, masculinity, burly raw strength, his sensuality and warmth.” Gone but never forgotten, Topol will always be “In Heaven with the Stars.”