By: Sushant Kumar Singh ( Deputy Editor-ICN Group )
On 6 January 2017, Om Puri died at the age of 66, after having a heart attack at his residence in Andheri, Mumbai.He was honoured at the 89th Academy Awards in memoriam segment for his contribution in Indian and world cinema. In his biography ‘Unlikely Hero Om Puri’ the actor wrote about what it was like being a part of Bollywood after doing some of the best art cinema in India:
When I first came to Bombay in 1976 to join the Hindi film industry, I had behind me an NSD and FTII background. NSD’s impact had been much deeper.Bollywood is a feudal system, hierarchical.
While a star can command ten crore rupees for a film, a character actor in the same film will not get more than fifty lakhs and a spot boy at the bottom of the ladder would get five hundred rupees a day.
In the mid-seventies, when the wave of change was carrying all of us with it, we saw cinema, theatre or television as means of making a difference. We were very aware that commercial cinema was not part of this scheme.
I was motivated by the middle cinema of Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Basu Chatterjee, Gulzar and others and in some measure the art house cinema of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and their ilk.
The trouble was that middle Indian cinema would not accept actors like me as they had their established stars like Amol Palekar, Sanjeev Kumar, even Amitabh Bachchan sometimes, and others, though these films were commercially viable. And art films were usually low-budget films and our pay couldn’t really compare to that of actors in the other genres. It was like surviving on bread alone – without butter or jam.
Some of my colleagues from ‘art cinema’ commented on this shift but I have always maintained that I do not really discriminate between the two genres. One just cannot earmark a film as merely art or commercial. The choice is between a good or a bad film.
When Nandita C Puri wrote the biography of her husband, late actor Om Puri (Unlikely Hero, published by Lotus/Roli Books) it had a foreword by Hollywood actor Patrick Swazye.
Swayze described how he had an ‘Om Puri film festival’ before he met his co-star on the sets of City of Joy. Satyajit Ray’s Sadgati became his favourite performance of the Indian actor, although he later writes that Puri’s work as Hasari Pal in City of Joy was deserving of an Academy Award.Patrick Swayze died in the September of 2009 at the age of 57, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. His friend and co-star lived on to the age of 66, before he passed on too.
