Om Puri

Biography

Om Puri (born in Ambala, 1950; died in Mumbai, 2017) was an Indian actor whose career of more than four decades moved between the austere realism of Indian parallel cinema and the commercial mainstream of Hindi films, with a bit of British and international work along the way. He is widely regarded as one of the finest actors of world cinema.

Puri lacked the conventional glamour that Hindi cinema of the 1970s expected from its leading men. His face, that of the labourer, the clerk or the exhausted policeman, became his trademark, and he gave those lives a seriousness that let audiences recognise themselves on screen.

He was born in Ambala, then in East Punjab and now in Haryana, into a Punjabi Hindu family. His childhood was hard. When he was six, his father was jailed on a charge of stealing cement from the railways, and the family lost its home. Om worked in a tea stall and gathered coal from the railway tracks to keep the household going. Even his birth date was uncertain: his school recorded 9 March 1950, and later, in Bombay, he settled on 18 October.

He trained at the National School of Drama in Delhi, where he befriended Naseeruddin Shah, and then at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. His first notable role came in the Marathi film Ghashiram Kotwal (1976). Alongside Shah, Shabana Azmi, Smita Patil and Amrish Puri, he became one of the defining faces of the Indian art cinema of the period, in films such as Sadgati, Ardh Satya and Mirch Masala.

In Govind Nihalani's Aakrosh he played a tribal labourer in a performance that is almost wordless, conveying rage and helplessness through his eyes and body, and it earned him the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor. In Ardh Satya he played an honest policeman who slowly comes apart, a role that won him a National Film Award for Best Actor. The same year he showed a very different comic side in the satire Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Television also gave him memorable work, notably in Tamas, adapted from Bhisham Sahni's novel about Partition violence.

From the early 1990s he built an international career, sharing the screen with Patrick Swayze in City of Joy, Jack Nicholson in Wolf and Val Kilmer in The Ghost and the Darkness. In East Is East he played George Khan, a Pakistani immigrant defending his identity against his westernised children, a role that earned him a BAFTA nomination. He later played General Zia-ul-Haq in Charlie Wilson's War.

His legacy is that of an actor who showed that the discipline of art cinema could enrich popular film without being diluted by it. He died in Mumbai in 2017.

Key films

• Gandhi (1982), directed by Richard Attenborough, in a brief role that hinted at his international career.
• Aakrosh (1980), directed by Govind Nihalani, a nearly wordless performance that won him the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor.
• Ardh Satya (1983), directed by Govind Nihalani, in which he played an honest policeman who gradually becomes corrupted.
• East Is East (1999), directed by Damien O'Donnell, as George Khan, a Pakistani father in northern England.
• Charlie Wilson's War (2007), directed by Mike Nichols, as General Zia-ul-Haq.