AMN / KOLKATA
Legendary actor Soumitra Chatterjee, star of some of Bengali cinema’s finest films, has died. He was 85. Mr Chatterjee tested positive for COVID-19 last month and was taken to hospital
Soumitra Chatterjee was taken to Kolkata’s Belle Vue Clinic hospital on October 6, a day after he tested positive for the coronavirus.
Chatterjee had started his career in All India Radio Kolkata as an announcer. He made his first appearance on the silver screen as Apu in the ‘Apur Sansar’ with the great maestro Satyajit Ray as the director. He has been active on big and small screens almost till the date he fell sick. The theatre personality, poet Soumitar Chatterjee has his own fan following. He is considered as one of the icons in the cultural arena of Bengal.
He had won a number of awards in home and abroad which include Padma Bhushan as well as the highest French civilian award Legion of Honour.
Chatterjee was best-known for his work with Ray, one of the world’s most influential directors and maker of the much-feted Apu Trilogy. The series followed the life of a man who grew up in a Bengali village. The films garnered critical acclaim, winning many awards worldwide, and put Indian cinema on the global map.
The third movie of the trilogy, Apur Sansar, which released in 1959, was also Chatterjee’s debut film. He would go on to star as the lead actor in 14 of Ray’s films.
Pauline Kael, one of America’s most influential and respected film critics, called Chatterjee Ray’s “one-man stock company” who moved “so differently in the different roles he plays that he is almost unrecognisable”.
Chatterjee was awarded the Dada Saheb Phalke Award, the highest honour in Indian cinema, in 2012 and in 2018, he was given France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour.
He began acting when he was in school, where he starred in several plays. He was in college when a friend introduced him to Ray – it was a chance meeting, but it eventually led to Chatterjee’s film debut.
Chatterjee’s roles in more than a dozen films made by the auteur spanned a wide range.
He played a Sherlock Holmes-like detective in Sonar Kella, an effete bridegroom in Devi, a hot-tempered north Indian taxi driver in Abhijan, a city slicker in Aranyer Din Ratri, and a mild-mannered village priest in Asani Sanket. He also played what Seton called a “thinly veiled portrait” of Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore in Charulata, one of Ray’s most admired films.