Gila Almagor renews wedding vows to mark her 80th birthday

Almagor was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Achievement Award in 1996.

By HANNAH BROWN
Gila Almagor (photo credit: REUTERS)
Gila Almagor
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Gila Almagor, the first lady of Israeli cinema and theater, turned 80 on July 22 – and one of the ways she celebrated is by renewing her vows with her husband of 55 years, Yaakov Agmon, the former director of Habima Theater.
The two, who married in a very low-key ceremony in the early 1960s, have chosen to renew their vows several times, most recently in late March, to coincide with Agmon’s 90th birthday and a bit ahead of Almagor’s 80th.
The veteran couple was included in a roundup of celebrity couples renewing their vows in the magazine, Pnai Plus, and the two look just as radiant and happy as any of the younger marrieds.
Almagor, who won the Israel Prize for cinema in 2004 and dozens of other awards, was born months after the death of her father, a Haifa policeman, who was killed by an Arab sniper. She was left to care for her mother, a Holocaust survivor, who was slowly losing her mind. Almagor wrote two books about her harrowing childhood, The Summer of Aviya and Under the Domim Tree, which were made into award-winning films in which Almagor portrayed the character based on her own mother. She won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival for Summer of Aviya.
She has had a stellar career in theater, where she portrayed characters including Anne Frank and starred in plays such as Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and in film, where she played key roles in Siege, the Oscar-nominated The House on Chelouche Street, Life According to Agfa and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. She can currently be seen in the hit comedy, Mossad. She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jerusalem Film Festival in 1996.
While Almagor prefers not to be feted at parties, when she served as the president of the 15th Tel Aviv International Children’s Film Festival – an event with which she has been associated for many years – she was serenaded at the July 16 opening ceremony by a number of her colleagues, including several actresses whom she has inspired such as Nelly Tagar, Dana Ivgy and Evgenia Dodina.