Soumitra Chatterjee
Soumitra 'Chatterjee was an film actor, play-director, playwright, writer, thespian and poet who worked in Bengali cinema. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential actors in the history of Indian cinema. He is best known for his collaborations with director Satyajit Ray, with whom he worked in fourteen films.
Starting with his debut film, Apur Sansar, the third part of The Apu Trilogy, as adult Apu, he went on to work in several films with Ray, including Abhijan, Charulata, Kapurush, Aranyer Din Ratri, Ashani Sanket, Sonar Kella and Joi Baba Felunath as Feluda, Hirak Rajar Deshe, Ghare Baire, Shakha Proshakha and Ganashatru.
He also worked with other noted directors of Bengali cinema, such as Mrinal Sen in Akash Kusum ; Tapan Sinha in Kshudhita Pashan, Jhinder Bandi ; Asit Sen in Swaralipi, Ajoy Kar in Parineeta, and Tarun Mazumdar in Ganadevata. He acted in more than 210 films in his career. He also received critical acclaim for his directorial debut Stree Ki Patra which was based on the Bengali short story Streer Patra by Rabindranath.
Soumitra was the recipient of multiple honours and awards. Soumitra was the first Indian film personality who was conferred with France's highest award for artists '
Early life and background
Soumitra Chatterjee was born in Mirjapur Street near Sealdah railway station, in Calcutta in 1935. The first ten years of his early life were spent in Krishnanagar in West Bengal where he studied in C.M.S. St. John's High School. The town under the influence of playwright Dwijendralal Ray, also from Krishnanagar, had a flourishing theatre culture, with numerous small theatre groups. His grandfather was the president of one such group while his father, though lawyer by profession and later a government worker, also worked as an amateur actor. Encouraged by the praise he received for his acting in school plays, gradually his interest in theatre grew with passing years. He was a very close friend of famous theatre personality, Mrityunjay Sil who is often regarded as a key influence on his career.Soumitra and his family moved to Howrah where he studied at the Howrah Zilla School and Calcutta during his early years. Soumitra graduated from the City College, Kolkata with honours in Bengali literature, as a graduating student of the University of Calcutta. He lived for a few years in Calcutta in Satyajit Ray's old apartment at 3-lake temple road. He studied for his M.A. in Bengali from the University of Calcutta. While still a student, he learnt acting under noted actor-director of Bengali theatre Ahindra Choudhury. However a turning point came when in the final year of college he saw a play by Sisir Bhaduri, theatre director and the doyen of Bengali theatre. The play not only set a standard for acting for him, but also helped make up his mind to become an actor. He managed to meet Bhaduri, through his friend's mother, actress Shefalika Putul. Though, he met Bhaduri, towards the end of his career, when his theatre had closed, nevertheless over the next three years, till Bhaduri's death in 1959, Chatterjee made him a mentor, and learnt the craft of acting through their regular interactions. He even appeared in a small role in one of Bhaduri's productions.
Subsequently, he started his career working in All India Radio as an announcer, While he was there he started pursuing a career in films. He came in touch with Ray during the casting for Aparajito, who was looking for new faces. Ray thought he had the right look, however found him, age 20, and just out of college, too old for the role of adolescent Apu. Ray remembered him and offered him the role of adult Apu two years later. Meanwhile, he was rejected in his screen test for Bengali film, Nilachale Mahaprabhu directed by Kartik Chattopadhyay.
Career
Work with Satyajit Ray: 1959–1990
Chatterjee had gone on the sets of Ray's fourth film, Jalsaghar to watch the shoot. He was unaware that he had already been selected for the title role in the Apu trilogy. That day, while he was leaving the sets, Ray called him over and introduced him to actor Chhabi Biswas as "This is Soumitra Chattopadhyay; he's playing Apu in my next film Apur Sansar" leaving him much surprised. Despite being selected, as a debutant actor, Chatterjee was nevertheless unsure of his career choice and especially his looks, as he didn't consider himself photogenic. However, on 9 August 1958, when the first shooting of the film was accepted in a single take, he realized that he had found his vocation. Thus Soumitra's film debut came in 1959 in Satyajit Ray's The World of Apu. In fact, Ray believed with a beard Chatterjee looked like young poet laureate Tagore.Soumitra would go on to collaborate with Ray in fourteen films. His centrality to Ray's work is akin to other key collaborations in the history of cinema — Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini, De Niro and Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, Max von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman, Jerzy Stuhr and Krzysztof Kieślowski, Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog. After Apur Sansar, he also worked with Sharmila Tagore in a number of Ray's films, apart from working with leading star actor of the period, Uttam Kumar, with whom he has often been compared, in eight films.
Chatterjee was cast in diverse roles by Ray and some of the stories and screenplays that Ray wrote were said to be written with him in mind. Soumitra featured as Feluda/Pradosh Chandra Mitter, the famous private investigator from Calcutta in Ray's Feluda series of books, in two films in the 1970s Sonar Kella and Joi Baba Felunath. These two films were the first film series made for Feluda and are considered as the Feluda original film series. He was the first person who portrayed the iconic Bengali sleuth Feluda. Satyajit Ray made some illustrations of Feluda based on Soumitra's body figure and look in the 1970s Feluda books. After him, Sabyasachi Chakrabarty took the role of the iconic Bengali hero Feluda in the mid-1990s.
Soumitra had approached Satyajit Ray to suggest a name for a little magazine founded by Soumitra and Nirmalya Acharya in 1961. Satyajit Ray had named the magazine Ekkhon, he designed the inaugural cover page and illustrated the cover pages regularly even after Soumitra had stopped editing the magazine. Nirmalya continued editing the magazine, and several of Ray's scripts were published in the magazine.
Other works
Besides working with Ray, Soumitra excelled in collaborations with other well-known Bengali directors such as Mrinal Sen and Tapan Sinha. He earned critical acclaim for his role of an impostor in Mrinal Sen's Akash Kusum. He was equally confident in playing the swashbuckling horse-riding villain in Tapan Sinha's Jhinder Bandi giving the legendary Uttam Kumar a tough challenge. In the romantic film Teen Bhubaner Pare, he shared the screen with actress Tanuja, the film was noted for his "flamboyant" style of acting. Besides films, Chatterjee continued acting in Kolkata-based Bengali theatre, and also published over 12 poetry books.Entering the 1980s and 1990s, he started working with contemporary directors, like Goutam Ghose, Aparna Sen, Anjan Das and Rituparno Ghosh, and even acted on television. In 1986, he played the role of a swimming coach, Khitish Singh in film Kony directed by Saroj Dey, who was part of the film collective Agragami. The film is about a young girl from a slum, who wants to become a swimmer. At the 32nd National Film Awards, the film won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment. Later in a 2012 interview, he called Kony one of the best films of his career. He even recalled using film's catch-phrase "Fight-Koni-fight" in hard times, as a chant to himself to lift his "aging spirits". The phrase had become popular with middle-class Bengalis at the time. He also starred in his biopic Abhijaan directed by Parambrata Chatterjee, an artist himself. The movie was released in April 2022 posthumously as a tribute to Soumitra featuring Jisshu Sengupta who portrayed the younger self of the late artist.
Theatre
He replaced Mrityunjay Sil as the lead artist in 1958. Mrityunjay Sil was at the peak of his theatre career at that time. But due to personal issues he suggested his friend, Soumitra's name. Mrityunjay Sil is often credited with being one of the few people to have helped Soumitra. But, he soon left his job.After a two-decade long busy career as a leading man of Bengali cinema, he returned to theatre in 1978, with his production Naam Jiban, staged at Biswarupa Theatre in Kolkata. This led to other plays like Rajkumar, Phera, Nilkantha, Ghatak Biday and Nyaymurti, beside notable plays like Tiktiki, an adaptation of Sleuth and Homapakhi. Besides acting, he has written and directed several plays, translated a few and also branched out to poetry reading in recent decades.
Since 14 November 2010, he regularly performed in the title role of the play Raja Lear directed by Suman Mukhopadhyay and produced by Minerva Repertory Theatre, a play based on King Lear by William Shakespeare. Soumitra received widespread critical and popular accolades for his acting in the play.