Biography

Shlomo Bar-Shavit (Hebrew: שלמה בר-שביט; December 7, 1928 – September 8, 2019) was an Israeli actor, voice actor and theatre director. Born in Jerusalem, his father was a construction worker and his mother, who was the granddaughter of Shlomo Elyashiv, was a nurse at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center. When Bar-Shavit was four years old, he was abandoned by his parents after they separated and he spent a majority of his childhood in 13 different foster institutions. At the age of nine, Bar-Shavit wanted to become an actor after witnessing a play that one of the foster homes organised and he got his first experience as a stage actor at the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv in the late 1940s.In 1948, Bar-Shavit enlisted in the IDF and joined up with the Chizbatron. From 1949 onwards, Bar-Shavit acted in many Habima plays, which includes Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Peer Gynt, Kazablan, Irma La Douce, Richard III and many more. He received mixed reviews in his performance in a play about the 1947–1949 Palestine war. He also once received uproar from some audience members because of his portrayal of Josef Mengele in a play about the Holocaust. For a number of years, Bar-Shavit was on the Habima's management team and served as an artistic director and in 1999, he directed a theatrical adaptation of The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In cinema and television, Bar-Shavit made his debut screen appearance in the 1964 film Bring the Girls to Eilat. He also starred in the 1970 film Lupo! directed by Menahem Golan. From 2009 until 2011, he had a recurring role as the father of the central protagonist in the television series Polishuk and he appeared in the season 9 episode premiere of Life is Not Everything. As a voice actor, he dubbed the voices of characters into the Hebrew language. These include Rafiki in The Lion King films, Jasper in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Fagin in Oliver & Company and he also served as the voice of Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films before he was replaced by Albert Cohen.In 2001, Bar-Shavit released an autobiography. Three years later, a documentary was released detailing his life.