BackSaeed Jaffrey, the global Indian actor
Saeed Jaffrey was one of the few Indian actors whose fame extended beyond the country of his birth
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Mumbai: It is likely that Saeed Jaffrey will be as missed in the UK as he is here. The actor, who died on Monday in Mumbai at 86, was born in India, but found fame as a TV and film performer in England, and as Hollywood’s favourite Indian-actor-for-hire.
In fact, one could even say that Jaffrey’s appearances in English TV, from Tandoori Nights to The Jewel in the Crown, made him more of a household name there than in his country of birth.
He went to school in Aligarh and Mussoorie, and later attended Allahabad University. “I was exposed to a Muslim school, so I learnt Urdu. I was exposed to a Hindu school, so I learnt Hindi. I was exposed to a Church of England school, so I got my Senior Cambridge certificate," he told The Independent in 2011.
His interest in the performing arts grew, and he attended the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, then won a Fulbright scholarship to go to the US.
Jaffrey’s acting career began in the 1960s with small roles on television. Soon, the projects became bigger: he got a chance to work with Merchant-Ivory (he claimed in an interview that he was the one who introduced them) on The Guru in 1969, and with Omar Sharif and Jack Palance in John Frankenheimer’s The Horsemen in 1971. An even bigger opportunity came around in 1975, when he played Billy Fish in John Huston’s epic The Man Who Would Be King, starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery.
Jaffrey made his Hindi film debut (and got to use some of the Urdu he’d picked up as a child) as one of the obsessive chess players in Satyajit Ray’s classic Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977). After this, Indian directors began to cast him more often, and he played a range of memorable character parts in Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Buddoor (the paan-chewing Lallan Mian might be the enduring image of him for most Indians), Shekhar Kapoor’s Masoom, Shyam Benegal’s Mandi and Govind Nihalani’s Tamas.
Towards the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, he was increasingly seen in mainstream Bollywood productions: Chaalbaaz, Ram Lakhan, Henna, Dil.
As he was becoming well-known at home, Jaffrey was becoming equally famous abroad, through his appearances in the Raj-era miniseries The Jewel in The Crown and in films such as David Lean’s A Passage to India and Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (in which he played the role of Sardar Patel).
He appeared with Zohra Sehgal in a popular British comedy series about warring restaurateurs, Tandoori Nights. And he was terrific as Nasser, a Pakistani in London trying to keep his wife and mistress happy, in My Beautiful Laundrette. It is hardly surprising that he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to drama.
He worked less frequently in the last decade and a half, which explains why he might have slipped out of the popular imagination somewhat. But there’s little chance that the public’s memories of his Lallan Mian, Mir Roshan Ali, Billy Fish or Jimmy Sharma will fade any time soon.
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