Acclaimed Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan, whose international movie career included hits such as Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi and The Amazing Spider-Man, has died aged 53, his publicist said yesterday.
The star, who was diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour in 2018, was admitted to a Mumbai hospital earlier this week with a colon infection.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid tribute to the award-winning actor, tweeting “Irrfan Khan’s demise is a loss to the world of cinema and theatre.”
The actor was buried at the Versova cemetery in Mumbai with just family and a few friends and colleagues attending due to the restrictions in place to contain the coronavirus.
Born Sahabzade Irfan Ali Khan in Rajasthan, in a family with no ties to the cinema, the actor recalled in interviews that as children, he and his siblings were not allowed to watch movies.
The only exception was when a visiting uncle took them to the theatre.
But his training in Shakespeare and Chekhov did little to ease his entry into the Hindi film industry, which was then largely focused on churning out formulaic song-and-dance blockbusters.
Even as he landed a role in 1988’s Salaam Bombay - directed by first-timer Mira Nair - his part was slashed to a cameo.
He sobbed for hours when he found out about the cuts, he told India’s Open magazine.
“It changed something within me. I was prepared for anything after that,” he said.
Television roles followed, along with a handful of bit parts in Bollywood, where producers routinely dismissed him as looking too unconventional to play the lead.
By the time British director Asif Kapadia cast him as a mercenary in The Warrior, he was ready to quit acting, frustrated over the direction of his career.
But, in a sign of the global success that lay in wait, the 2001 film racked up awards and won Khan praise - including in India, where a new generation of directors was eager to experiment with fresh storylines.
His drama school training came in handy when he was cast in Maqbool and Haider -ncontemporary Hindi adaptations of Macbeth and Hamlet.
But he also charmed audiences in lighter fare such as Piku, featuring Bollywood superstars Amitabh Bachchan and Deepika Padukone, and The Lunchbox, in which he played a lonely accountant in love with a housewife.
He won India’s National Film Award in 2013 for his depiction of an athlete who becomes a bandit in the biographical movie Pan Singh Tomar.
Bachchan led tributes to Khan yesterday, describing him as “an incredible talent” whose death had left “a huge vacuum” in the industry.
His Slumdog Millionaire co-star Anil Kapoor called Khan “an inspiration for everyone, a remarkable actor, unmatched talent & a great human being”.
Actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas, one of a handful of Bollywood stars to find success in Hollywood, tweeted: “Your talent forged the way for so many in so many avenues. You inspired so many of us.”
Khan consciously sidestepped traditional Bollywood tropes, focusing on the subtleties of his craft.
This allowed him to carve out a stellar career in Hollywood as well, where he collaborated with Oscar-winning directors such as Danny Boyle and Ang Lee and appeared in the HBO show In Treatment.
Filmmaker Colin Trevorrow, who directed Khan in the 2015 blockbuster Jurassic World, described the actor as “a thoughtful man who found beauty in the world around him, even in pain”.
“In our last correspondence, he asked me to remember ‘the wonderful aspects of our existence’ in the darkest of days,” Trevorrow tweeted.
In an interview in 2015, Khan said Western audiences “appreciate the elements and layers you bring to the character”.
Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan’s wife Sutapa Sikdar arrives at the Kokilaben Ambani hospital in Mumbai yesterday.
