Sanjeev Kumar

The family dealt in zari, the brocade trade that Surat has run for centuries, and they came to Bombay when he was small. His father died of a heart attack when he was eleven, which is a detail worth holding onto given how he died himself. He went to the stage first, IPTA and then the Indian National Theatre, and immediately started doing the strangest thing an ambitious young actor can do.

At twenty two he played an old man in an adaptation of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. The next year, in a play called Damru directed by A.K. Hangal, he played a sixty year old with six children. Nobody was casting him that way out of necessity. He was a good-looking young man in a city that pays good-looking young men to be young. He wanted the harder job.

A small part in Hum Hindustani in 1960, then five years of nothing much, then Nishan in 1965 as a protagonist. What he did in the middle of that stretch does not appear on most accounts of his career. In 1966 he took the title role in Kalapi, Manhar Raskapur's Gujarati film about the poet, produced by Pragya Pictures and written by Prabodh Joshi, with Padmarani as the poet's wife Rama and Aruna Irani as the love interest. He worked with Irani again in the Gujarati film Mare Javun Pele Par in 1968.

He also holds a Best Actor award for the stage, for the Gujarati play Koi no Ladakh Vayo. Read those three credits together and the picture changes. This was not a Gujarati man who happened to succeed in Hindi cinema. This was an actor who was working in his own language on stage and on screen at exactly the point his Hindi career was still deciding whether to happen.

Khilona in 1970 is the film that made him a national name, and there is a claim attached to it that circulates widely: that it was a Hindi remake of his own Gujarati film Mare Javun Pele Paar. It is a good story. Gujarati cinema writing the part and Hindi cinema buying it, fifty years before anyone called that a trend.

The problem is that the record contradicts itself. His own English Wikipedia biography states the Gujarati origin. The English Wikipedia page for Khilona states the film was a remake of the 1963 Telugu film Punarjanma, made simultaneously in Tamil as Engirundho Vandhaal. Both cannot be the source. This site's rule is to print the disagreement rather than pick the version that flatters the argument, so here it is, unresolved. What is not in dispute is that Khilona won the Filmfare Best Movie award and he was nominated for Best Actor and did not win.

Gulzar first noticed him on the Indo-Iranian production Subah-O-Shaam in 1972 and then cast him nine times, and the pattern in those nine is the closest thing Indian cinema has to a controlled experiment on one actor. Old men in Parichay, Koshish, Aandhi and Mausam. His own age in Angoor and Namkeen. Same face, no prosthetics doing the heavy lifting, the age carried in the walk and the timing.

Koshish is the one that settles it. He played a man who is deaf and mute, opposite Jaya Bhaduri, in a film about a marriage conducted without speech, and won Best Actor at the 20th National Film Awards for films of 1972. An actor whose whole reputation rested on line delivery took the country's top acting prize in a part with no lines in it. Between those poles sit Naya Din Nai Raat, where he played nine roles, and Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khilari, where he played a Lucknow nobleman who has surrendered to a chessboard.

He never married. He proposed to Hema Malini in 1973 and stayed in touch with her afterwards. After a first heart attack he had bypass surgery in the United States, and on 6 November 1985 a second one killed him at forty seven. More than ten of his films were still to be released, the last of them Professor Ki Padosan in December 1993, only three quarters shot when he died, its second half rewritten to explain why his character had gone.

Then his home city did something unusual. Surat named a road after him, opened Sanjeev Kumar Marg, put his name on a school, and in February 2014 opened a Rs 108 crore auditorium in his name. India Post issued a stamp on 3 May 2013. Since 2015 the Sanjeev Kumar Foundation has sponsored an annual drama competition run by the municipal corporation, with prizes for best actor, actress, director and backstage technician. That last detail is the one that lands. The city is paying for the exact apprenticeship he had to leave Gujarat to get.