A natural performer

After impressing the Indians with his realistic portrayals, Om Puri has now moved to the West where he is getting noticed on the streets of New York. TERRENCE RAFFERTY writes...

ALTHOUGH OM PURI has appeared, by his own estimate, in about 140 films in his 24-year screen career and has been characterised by an expert on Indian cinema as ``the finest actor of the post- Independence generation'', he does not expect to be recognised on the streets of New York.

But when he and I step out for a cigarette in front of the SoHo Grand Hotel, a middle-aged man and woman strolling up West Broadway look startled, walk a few steps farther up the street, and then, after a fast conference, return, to tell Puri how impressed they had been by his performance in ``East Is East,'' which they had seen in Israel.

He accepts their praise graciously and modestly, and after they have moved on he puffs contentedly and beams. ``That's absolutely made my day.''

His delight is so contagious that I instantly banish my suspicion that this improbable encounter has been staged by the wily publicists of Miramax, which is releasing ``East Is East''. To be recognised, on a nearly deserted street, for a performance in a British art-house picture that has not even opened in the States? Not likely.

And yet, Puri's portrayal of George Khan - a Pakistani married to an Englishwoman (Linda Bassett) and trying to raise seven children in a racially mixed neighbourhood near Manchester in the 1970s is unforgettable, the sort of performance that should stop traffic. (Light pedestrian traffic, at least.) So I want this scene to be real: It couldn't happen to a nicer guy, or a better actor.

Back in the hotel's smoke-free lounge, Puri, clearly stimulated by the heady combination of recognition and nicotine, expands on his approach to the domestic tyrant George Khan, who could easily have been played as a monster. ``I look for subtext,'' he says, ``the hidden script within the script. Here's a working-class man who comes to England and finds himself in circumstances that are too huge for him to handle.

It's 1971. In Parliament there are people shouting about repatriation. This man who is so rigid on the surface has agreed to stay with his wife and send his children to modern schools. Even his daughter.

I knew I had to find a space for this in my portrayal, without departing from the script or changing the scenes. So when he hits a child it should be with pain. The anguish on his face should give a little balance to his monstrousness.''

That it does. The film, directed by Damien O'Donnell from a script by Ayub Khan-Din (based on his own play), opened smashingly in Britain; the distributor had to quadruple the number of prints within two weeks of its release. ``In the play,'' says O'Donnell, ``George Khan is less three-dimensional. Om brought in that vulnerability, which makes the whole situation of the family more ambiguous.''

Udayan Prasad, who directed Puri in ``Brothers in Trouble'' (1996) and ``My Son the Fanatic'' (1999), says: ``He's always surprising you. That's the sign of a great actor. You think you know exactly how he's going to play a scene, and then he does something different, and better.''

In ``My Son the Fanatic,'' written by Hanif Kureishi (``My Beautiful Laundrette''), Puri plays another working-class immigrant father, who is also a Muslim by birth and who also lives in the industrial north, but whose parenting difficulties are precisely the opposite of Khan's: Parvez, an easygoing cabdriver who loves jazz, drinks a little too much and is alarmed that his son has become a militant.

The actor considers Parvez the richest role that he has had in the English-speaking cinema. And besides, he says, ``I can more easily identify with that character. I consider him to be a citizen of the world. You could send him to Italy, you could send him to Spain, you could send him to Japan and the man would adjust. There is no place where there is not a collage of people, so there are frictions everywhere. Unless people have a sense of tolerance towards each other's beliefs, life is not going to be easy.''

Puri describes himself as ``very, very liberal,'' which is perhaps why most of his work has been in ``what we call the art cinema, where the assumption is that cinema or theatre is a medium of social commitment,'' he says. As he sees it, ``My whole training has set me up for that.''

Born in 1950, Puri worked his way through university where he joined a theatre group and ``drifted'' from his youthful ambition to be a military man like his father. The family did not object.

``My father could see that I was economically responsible and really hard-working, so he never questioned my activities.

And I never embarrassed him.'' He then spent three years at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, where he received what he describes, with some understatement, as a ``very well-rounded'' education in the theatre: he played Hamlet in Hindi at 23 and also performed (in that language) Brecht, Shaw, Ibsen and Indian folk plays.

After a couple of years at the Film Institute in Pune, Puri set out for the film industry capital, Mumbai. He anticipated having a hard time breaking into the movies, because he did not have ``an obvious personality'' - which means, in part, that he was not handsome enough to attract immediate attention.

But his theatre work got him noticed and once he had begun making movies his versatility kept him in demand.

By 1981, he was well known enough to get a call from Satyajit Ray, who was casting ``Sadgati'' (``Deliverance''), which was to be the Bengali film maker's first production in Hindi; Puri was his choice to play the lead, an untouchable.

In a way, the actor says, his career in the West is repeating the pattern of his career in India. He has had small parts in the major studio films ``Gandhi'' (1982), ``Wolf'' (1994) and ``The Ghost and the Darkness'' (1996), as well as a substantial supporting role in ``City of Joy'' (1992).

But his meatiest parts have been in serious, low-budget pictures. That's fine with him, because he has a good life and a thriving career in Mumbai, where he can practise his art in accordance with his bedrock principle: never let yourself be typecast. (His hero is Alec Guinness).

``Om has an unusual range for an actor,'' Prasad says. ``He seems equally natural playing an illiterate villager or a powerful intellectual.''

And equally content. Like Parvez - and unlike George Khan - the man adjusts. ``I am happy to be recognised here in New York,'' Puri says, near the end of our conversation.

And then, he says something that, coming from an actor, strikes me as astonishing, and that may at least partly account for the extraordinary mixture of intensity and serenity that informs an Om Puri performance. ``I, frankly, don't dream, because I want to remain happy. When you dream too much and the dream doesn't come true, you hurt yourself. And I don't want to hurt myself. So I don't dream. I take things as they are.''

The New York Times

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