Om Prakash PuriOBE (born 18 October 1950 in Ambala, died 6 January 2017 in Mumbai) was an Indian actor whose career of more than four decades carried him from a railway town in East Punjab to two National Film Awards, a BAFTA nomination and the memorial tribute of the 89th Academy Awards. Working principally in Hindi cinema, he also performed in English, Punjabi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, Urdu and Marathi, and he moved between the austere realism of India's parallel cinema and the broad pleasures of the commercial mainstream with a fluency that very few of his contemporaries could equal. He is widely regarded as one of the finest actors in world cinema.
Puri did not possess the conventional glamour that Hindi cinema of the 1970s expected of its leading men, and critics have long observed that this apparent disadvantage became the foundation of his authority. His was the face of the labourer, the clerk and the exhausted policeman, and he rendered those lives with a seriousness that made audiences recognise themselves on the screen. The Indian state honoured him with the Padma Shri in 1990, and in 2004 the United Kingdom made him an honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to the British film industry.
He is mostly remembered for the moral force of his work in Aakrosh (1980), Arohan (1982), Ardh Satya (1983) and the television films Sadgati (1981) and Tamas (1987), for comic invention in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), Chachi 420 (1997), Hera Pheri (2000), Chup Chup Ke (2006) and Dhol (2007), and for an international body of work that reached its summit in the British comedy drama East Is East (1999). His long association with the directors Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani produced some of the most enduring work of the Indian New Wave.
Early life and adversity
Om Puri was born in Ambala, then in the state of East Punjab and now in Haryana, into a Punjabi Hindu family. His father, Tek Chand Puri, served in the Indian Army and later worked on the railways. The family possessed no birth certificate, and even the date of his birth had to be recovered through patient inquiry. His mother remembered only that he had arrived two days after the festival of Dussehra, and an uncle, enrolling him in school, assigned him the date of 9 March 1950. Years later in Bombay, Puri consulted the calendar for 1950 and fixed his birthday as 18 October.
The circumstances of his childhood were severe. When he was six, his father was imprisoned on an allegation of stealing cement from the railways, and the family lost its home. His elder brother, Ved Prakash Puri, worked as a railway porter, while the young Om worked in a tea stall, took whatever odd jobs he could find and gathered coal from the railway tracks to keep the household alive. He and his brother's children were later raised in large part by a household servant named Shanti. It is difficult to read this history without sensing how much of it later entered his performances, for the hungry, overlooked and quietly furious men he would play were men he had already known.
Formation at NSD and FTII
Puri continued his studies while he worked, and after completing his early education he won admission to the National School of Drama in Delhi. There he formed a lifelong friendship with Naseeruddin Shah, who persuaded him to follow him to the Film and Television Institute of India in Poona, the present day Pune. He arrived so poor that, by his own later account, he did not own a presentable shirt.
The institute did not entirely satisfy him, and he struggled to meet its fees. Shah later recalled a characteristically mischievous postscript. When Puri had become famous, FTII pursued him for an outstanding debt of ₹280, and he declined to settle it, savouring what Shah described as the "impish thrill" of remaining in the institution's debt. His batchmates remembered a reserved and unusually quiet student, which makes the volcanic intensity of his early screen work all the more remarkable.
Career
Beginnings and the parallel cinema, 1975 to 1989
Puri's first film was the children's picture Chor Chor Chhup Ja. To support himself in these lean years he taught at the Actors' Studio, where his students included Gulshan Grover and Anil Kapoor. His first significant screen role came in the 1976 Marathi film Ghashiram Kotwal, adapted from Vijay Tendulkar's play and directed by K. Hariharan and Mani Kaul in a collective effort with sixteen graduates of FTII. He would later remark, without bitterness, that he had been paid "peanuts" for his finest work.
Then came Ardh Satya (1983), the film by which his career is most often measured. As Anant Velankar, an honest police inspector slowly poisoned by a corrupt system and his own violence, Puri gave Hindi cinema a hero who was neither saint nor avenger but a decent man coming apart in real time. Where the commercial cinema of the period offered the righteous fury of the angry young man as spectacle, Puri offered it as diagnosis, and the effect was unsettling in the best sense. The role won him his second National Film Award for Best Actor, following Arohan, as well as the Best Actor prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
In the same year he displayed an entirely different instrument in Kundan Shah's satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, playing the corrupt builder Ahuja with a lunatic comic energy that helped make the film a cult classic. That an actor could deliver Ardh Satya and Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro within a single season says a great deal about the breadth of his gift. He also appeared briefly in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), an early sign of the international career to come.
Television
Television allowed Puri to explore registers that the cinema of the 1980s seldom offered. In Kakaji Kahin (1988) he played a paan chewing politician in a pointed parody of the political class, and in Mr. Yogi (1988 to 1989) he served as a sly narrator who teased the protagonist at every turn, two performances that revealed a natural comedian. His work in Govind Nihalani's Tamas, adapted from Bhisham Sahni's novel of Partition violence, remains among the most acclaimed performances in the history of Indian television. He also appeared in Shyam Benegal's Bharat Ek Khoj and in the British series The Jewel in the Crown.
Puri in 2009, by then an actor equally at home in Mumbai, London and Hollywood
International cinema
From the early 1990s Puri built a second career abroad that few Indian actors of his generation could rival. He played opposite Patrick Swayze in City of Joy (1992), shared the screen with Jack Nicholson in Wolf (1994) and with Val Kilmer in The Ghost and the Darkness (1996). In Britain he gave a delicate and humane performance as a Pakistani taxi driver in My Son the Fanatic (1997), and two years later he created George Khan in East Is East, a first generation immigrant in Northern England at war with his own westernised children. It would have been easy to play George as a tyrant. Puri played him as a frightened man defending the only identity he had left, and the role brought him a nomination for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.
He went on to play General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in Charlie Wilson's War (2007), reprised George Khan in West Is West (2010) and starred opposite Helen Mirren in The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014), holding his own against one of the great actors of the English stage with warmth and impeccable timing. He also worked in Pakistani cinema, appearing in Actor in Law (2016). The director Gurinder Chadha, who cast him in Viceroy's House, remembered him as a man of wit and compassion who gave human dimension to characters that lesser actors would have reduced to types.
The commercial mainstream
In the mid 1990s, as the parallel cinema waned, Puri made a decision that some purists regretted and that history has vindicated. He entered the commercial mainstream as a character actor and proved that the discipline of the art house could enrich the popular film rather than be diluted by it. He was a hard bitten police officer in Ghayal (1990) and Gupt (1997), the leader of a Sikh militant cell in Gulzar's Maachis (1996), and the grieving father of a fallen soldier in Dhoop (2003). In the Kannada film A.K. 47 (1999) he played an uncompromising police commissioner and dubbed his own Kannada dialogue, and the film became a major commercial success.[citation needed]
At the time of his death Puri was at work on the Marathi film 15 August Bhagile 26 January. Several completed films reached audiences after he was gone, among them Viceroy's House and Tubelight (2017), so that for some years he seemed to keep working in his absence.
Craft and critical assessment
Critics returning to his work after his death were struck less by any single performance than by the improbable distance between them. The Economic Times described him as one of the most versatile shape shifters of his era, and The Hindu singled out six roles as defining, ranging from the silent fury of Aakrosh to the comic chaos of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. The BBC observed that recognition never fully matched his achievement, an assessment that says as much about the Indian star system as about the man.
What distinguished him was courage of a particular kind. He never asked an audience to admire him, and he was unafraid of stillness, of ugliness and of silence. He trusted the camera to find the truth in a tired face, and he trusted himself to step from the gravest tragedy into outright farce without condescending to either. In an industry that rewarded a single persona repeated until exhaustion, he chose reinvention again and again, and he carried each new self with the same unhurried dignity. The academic Rachel Dwyer called him India's face of the world, a phrase that captures both his international reach and the essential Indianness of everything he did.
Personal life
Puri married the writer and director Seema Kapoor, sister of the actor Annu Kapoor, in 1991, and the marriage ended within months. In 1993 he married the journalist Nandita Puri, with whom he had a son. Her 2009 biography, Unlikely Hero, angered him by its frank account of his earlier relationships, and in 2013 she filed a complaint of domestic violence, after which the couple separated.
Writing after his death, Nandita Puri described a secular household and a man who was not ritualistic but respected the faith of others. He drew solace from spiritual reading, particularly the works of Eknath Easwaran, which he pressed upon friends, and he relaxed by cooking and gardening. In a 2012 interview with Rajya Sabha TV he spoke of his love of farming and food, and confessed that his dream was to open a roadside dhaba called Daal Roti.
Public life and controversies
Puri spoke his mind in public, and on two occasions his words drew sharp criticism. During the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement he used insulting language about members of Parliament, who issued privilege notices against him, and he subsequently apologised, explaining that he had spoken in a moment of high emotion. In October 2016, during a televised debate following the Uri attack, he made remarks about Indian soldiers that provoked widespread anger, and he again apologised publicly and without reservation.
Death and legacy
Om Puri died of a heart attack at his home in Andheri, Mumbai, on 6 January 2017, at the age of 66. Tributes came from Mumbai, London and Lahore alike, and in February 2017 the 89th Academy Awards included him in its in memoriam tribute, a rare honour for an Indian actor.
His legacy is that of the boy who gathered coal beside the railway tracks of Ambala and lived to be honoured by two nations and mourned by the world's film industry. He proved that an Indian actor without the conventional advantages of the star could command the art house, the box office and the international stage, and he did it without ever pretending to be anyone other than himself.
In 1990 the Government of India conferred on him the Padma Shri, the country's fourth highest civilian award. In 2004 he was appointed an honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to the British film industry.
In 1998 the Montreal World Film Festival presented him with the Grand Prix Spécial des Amériques for his exceptional contribution to the art of cinema.
