Daliah Lavi

Born as Daliah Lewinbuk, occasionally rendered as Levenbuch, on October 12, 1942, near what is now Haifa, Israel, to a Russian father and German mother, Daliah Lavi passed her childhood on a kibbutz alongside her parents. There in 1952 she is said to have encountered Kirk Douglas during his filming of The Juggler in Israel; the actor took notice of the girl and secured ballet training for her in Sweden, where she first sampled acting with a minor part in the 1955 production Hemsöborna. Not long afterward she returned to Israel and explored modeling along with other pursuits, yet by 1960 her screen career had formally launched. Commanding several languages, Lavi gained recognition throughout Europe and America via numerous films, chiefly comedies that frequently carried an erotic charge, among them La Frusta e il Corpo in 1963, The Silencers in 1966, and the 1967 Bond parody Casino Royale. Following Hebrew song performances on Israeli singer Topol’s BBC program, she secured a contract in 1969 with Polydor Records in Germany and rapidly emerged as a leading figure in schlager music through successes such as “Oh, Wann Kommst Du?” and “Willst Du mit Mir Geh’n?” together with German adaptations of additional well-known songs. Although she issued sporadic albums during the 1980s and 1990s, Lavi never recovered the prominence of her earlier period, even as the 2000s brought renewed attention via multiple greatest-hits collections and a sample of her voice by Jürgen Paape on the track “So Weit Wie Noch Nie” from the Kompakt anthology Total 3. Daliah Lavi passed away in May 2017 at her residence in Asheville, North Carolina, aged 74.