THE BRIDGE (REMEMBERING IRRFAN KHAN)
He was so massive, it would be easy to settle for being a Bollywood celebrity.
However Irrfan Khan was not the kind of actor to settle.
And while he carved out a successful career in Hindi cinema, he was critical of Bollywood movie chiefs for lacking originality, he set his sights on building a career outside India as well.
Khan began his career in an Oscar nominated movie by the American based Indian director Mira Nair but went onto work with the likes of Asif Kapadia, Michael Winterbottom, Wes Anderson, Danny Boyle, Ang Lee, Colin Trevorrow and Jon Favreau.
Born and raised in a Muslim family in Jaipur in 1967, he spent his childhood in Tonk and was a promising cricketer.
Khan wax so good he was selected for the prestigious under 23 CK Nayudu Trophy - a tournament that paved the way for many of the country's top professionals.
However he could not afford to travel and the chance was missed.
Luckily, he had an uncle on his mother's side of the family who was a performance artist who nurtured his other great passion - acting.
He would take Khan to the theatre and introduced him to many in the profession in Jodhpur.
With some performances onstage under his belt, he studied drama in Jaipur before securing a place at the National School of Drama in New Delhi in 1984.
Shortly after graduation three years later, Khan landed a role in Mira Nair's critically acclaimed drama 'Salaam Bombay', the Oscar nominated tale of children living on the streets of the city.
However his performance was significantly cut.
Despite this setback, Khan began to acquire experience in television productions - playing the Russian leader Lenin in 'Laal Ghass Par Needle Ghode', an adaptation of a play by Mikhail Shatrov.
Khan landed the plum roles of a psycho in the series 'Daar' and an Urdhu poet in the historical series 'Kakhashan'.
This national exposure led to other high profile roles in television series like 'Stat Bestsellers', 'Chanakya', 'Bharat Ek Khoj', 'Chandrakhanta',
'Shikrant' and 'Sparsh' during the 1990s.
However he also cut his teeth in Bollywood movies appearing in Basu Chatterjee's 1989 drama 'Kamla Ki Maut', Ghovind Nihilani"s acclaimed 1990 drama 'Drishti' which won a National Film Award for the Best Film in Hindi, Bengali director Tapan Sinha's award winning 1990 medical drama 'Ek Doctor Ki Maut' and Gul Nagar Singh's well received 1999 football drama 'The Goal'.
A year earlier, he caught the attention of international audiences in an Indo-Canadian co-production, Sturla Gunarsson's 'Such A Long Journey' which was screened at the Toronto Film Festival and earned 12 nominations at Canada's top film awards, the Genies including Best Picture.
In 1995, Khan married Sutapa Sikhar who had studied with athim the National School of had Drama. They two sons.
After an appearance with On Puri and Tabu in Akashdeep's 2000 Bollywood crime drama 'Ghaath', he played s public prosecutor in Vikram Bhatt's 2001 suspense thriller 'Kasoor' which adapted Adrian Lyme's Hollywood thriller 'Jagged Edge' but also borrowed from Robert Zemeckis' 'What Lies Beneath'.
There were also substantial roles that year in Fareeda Mehta's well received street drama 'Kali Salwar' and Mahesh Bhan's thriller 'Gunaah' in which he played a police inspector but which flopped.
However Khan was to get his big breakthrough internationally as Lafcadia, the lead character in Asif Kapadia's gripping, BAFTA award winning 'The Warrior'.
Critically acclaimed, it came at a time when Khan was dissatisfied with his career and was considering giving up acting and it's international success cemented his reputation in his homeland.
There were lead roles in the 2003 Shyam Ramsay horror film 'Dhund' (a remake of Jim Gillespie's hit American slasher film 'I Know What You Did Last Summer'), Padam Kumar's Hindi gangster film 'Supari', Vishal Bhardwaj's critically lauded crime drama 'Maqbool' which adapted 'Macbeth' with Tabu and On Puri and Tigmanshu Dhulua's hit 2004 action thriller 'Charas'.
The German filmmaker Florian Gallenberger cast Khan as a customs officer in the 2004 romantic drama 'Shadows of Time' which was well received.
There was a lead role as a police officer plagued with insomnia in Himanshu Brahmbhatt's 2005 thriller 'Rog' - a Hindi remake of Otto Preminger's 1944 film noir classic 'Laura'.
Khan also played a wealthy drug addict in Saurabh Shukla's 2005 thriller 'Chehraa' and joined Anil Kapoor and Sushma Reddy in Vivek Agnihotri's 'Chocolate' - a Hindi remake of Bryan Singer's 'The Usual Suspects'.
In Ishvan Predevi's Bollywood comedy 'Seven-and-a-Half Predi', he played the uncle of a bride who Juwi Chalwa's TV director is trying to lure into a reality show.
Khan took on the Tom Cruise role in Hasnain Hyderabadwala and Raksha Mistry's 2006 thriller 'The Killer', a remake of Michael Mann's stylish Hollywood thriller 'Collateral' but it underperformed at the box office.
He was also reunited with Mira Nair who cast him and Tabu in her acclaimed English language drama 'The Namesake' about West Bengali immigrants trying to get by in the United States and he landed a Best Supporting Male nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards.
The Canadian filmmaker Vic Sarin also cast him alongside Jimi Mistry and Neve Campbell in the costume drama 'Partition' about the partition of India in 1947 and its impact on friends from different religious backgrounds.
Now firmly on the radar of international movie producers, Khan was cast as The Father in Wes Anderson's delightful and typically quirky Indian-set comedy 'The Darjeeling Limited' with Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman and Anjelica Huston.
Michael Winterbottom also cast him as a Karachi police chief alongside Angelina Jolie, Archie Panjabi and Will Hutton in 'A Mighty Heart' - a critically acclaimed retelling of Mariane Pearl's attempts in Pakistan to trace the whereabouts of her kidnapped husband, the New York Times reporter Daniel Pearl.
Meanwhile back in India, he enjoyed success in Anurag Basu's Mumbai musical drama 'Life in a Metro' which also featured Shilpa Shetty which drew on elements of David Lean's romantic classic 'Brief Encounter' and Billy Wilder's 'The Apartment'.
He played the father of an autistic boy in Kaushik Roy's award winning drama 'Apna Asmaan' with Anupam Kher, which broke new ground for Indian cinema in its depiction of the condition.
Anil Mehta's Hindi dance film 'Aaja Nachle' and K Ajay Kumar's thriller 'Tulsi' stuttered at the box office.
He scored a major hit in 2008 in Nishikant Kamat's 'Mumbai Meri Jaan' in which he played a Muslim street vendor who is subject to sectarian abuse in the midst of the 2006 Mumbai train bombings which killed 209 people and injured over 700 others.
Khan joined Priyanka Chopra and Bobby Deol in Kabeer Kaushik's thriller 'Chamku'.
Outside of India, he was to work again with Mira Nair in her segment for the comedy drama anthology film 'New York, I Love You', acting alongside Natalie Portman but the film, whose co-directors included Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Jiang When and Shekhar Kapur, received tepid reviews
However it was his role as the police chief interrogating Dev Patel's 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' winner in Danny Boyle's Oscar garlanded 'Slumdog Millionaire' which was to dramatically increase his international profile.
While international critics raved about Boyle's film, the reaction in India was mixed, with the writer Salman Rushdie and director Adoor Gopalakrishnan leading criticism of the film.
Yet, despite its global success, it was still four years before the Hollywood roles started rolling in.
Khan still enjoyed prominent roles in Hindi thrillers like Suparn Verma's 2009 action hit 'Acid Factory', Kabir Khan's spy thriller 'New York', Mani Shankar's 2010 hit 'Knock Out' (which drew from Joel Schumacher's taut Hollywood hit 'Phone Booth'), Neeraj Pathak's 'Right Yaaa Wrong' and Sudhir Mishra's acclaimed 2011 smash hit 'Yeh Saali Zindagi' in which he played a chartered accountant drawn into the dodgy dealings of a crime gang.
He also dabbled again in comedy in Priyadarshan's well received 2009 hit 'Billu' whose cast included Om Puri and Priyanka Chopra in which he played a poor barber whose life is transformed when a Bollywood production comes to his village.
In Vishal Bhardwaj's black comedy '7 Khoon Maaf', Khan was the third husband of an Anglo Indian woman, played by Priyanka Chopra, who murders the men she marries.
Khan's character was a soft spoken poet by day but a sadomasochist at night who gets his comeuppance for beating his wife but despite enthusiastic reviews, the film failed to draw audiences.
There was also an appearance in Jennifer Chambers Lynch's poorly received American India horror film 'Hisss' with the Bollywood actress Mallika Sherawat and Jeff Doucette.
Ang Lee, however, was to give him a pivotal role as the adult Piscine in his sumptuous, Academy Award winning 2012 big screen adaptation of Yann Martel's novel 'The Life of Pi' with Suraj Sharma, Rafe Spall, Tabu and Gerard Depardieu.
He appeared on the small screen opposite Gabriel Byrne as Sunil, an angry immigrant widower in the third season of HBO's psychiatry drama 'In Treatment'.
There was also a role in his first Hollywood blockbuster as Dr Rajit Ratha in Marc Webb's Marvel film 'The Amazing Spiderman' with Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Sally Field and Martin Sheen.
Khan admitted he had reservations but was talked into taking on the role in the hit movie, which was well received by critics, by his two sons.
He now divided his time between Indian and international projects.
Global audiences delighted in his charming performance alongside Nimrat Kaur in Riteish Batra's delightful BAFTA nominated contemporary Mumbai romance 'The Lunchbox'.
Indian cinemagoers lapped up his turn as s Prince in Tigmanshu Dhulia's 'Saheb, Biwi Aur Gangster Returns', a 2013 hit romantic thriller and Nikhil Advani's action thriller 'D Day' in which he played an Indian intelligence chief.
There was a guest role in Anant Mahedevan's hit 2014 romantic thriller 'The Xpose' and a performance as a place commissioner in Bollywood's 10th top grossing film, Ali Abbas Zafar's 'Gunday'.
In 2015, he popped up as the Indian mogul behind a dinosaur theme park in Colin Trevorrow's underwhelming box office smash 'Jurassic World' with Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and Vincent D'Onofrio - a long awaited reboot of the 'Jurassic Park' franchise.
Khan scored a domestic comedy hit, playing a taxi driver in Shoojit Sircar's 'Piku', acti g alongside the Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan.
In Sanjay Gupta's stylish thriller 'Jazbaa' with Aishwarya Rai and Shaban's Azmi, he played a policeman wrongfully suspended from the force.
Jon Favreau cast him as the voice of Baloo in the dubbed Hindi version of his 2016 Disney CGI version of 'The Jungle Book'.
He got to work with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks in 'Inferno', his 2016 sequel to 'The Da Vinci Code', playing the CEO of a private security firm The Consortium.
There was a well received return to comedy in Saket Chaudhary's 'Hindi Medium' about a Delhi couple's efforts to get their child educated in an English medium school which landed him a Best Actor gong at the International Indian Film Academy Awards.
Khan had the lead role in the acclaimed 2017 Bangladeshi-Indian co-production 'No Bed of Roses' from the director Mostofa Sarwar Farooki, a drama about two families coming to terms with the death of a patriarch.
In Anup Singh's beautifully shot Swiss-French-Singaporean Hindi language drama 'Song of the Scorpions', he earned good reviews for his portrayal of a camel trader who falls for Golshifteh Narahani's tribal woman Nooran.
There was also a role in the 2018 Japanese miniseries 'Tokyo War Trial' about the 1946 International Military Tribunal for the Far East in which he played the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal among a cast that included Paul Freeman, Stephen McHattie and Michael Ironside.
In 2018, he starred alongside Kelly MacDonald as her puzzle partner in Marc Turteltaub's critically acclaimed indie comedy drama 'Puzzle'
There was also a lead role in Abhinay Deo's Hindi black comedy 'Blackmail' in which he played a toilet paper sales executive who life turns upside down when he discovers his wife is having an extramarital affair and in Akarsh Khurana's lauded comedy road movie 'Karwaan'.
That year, Khan suffered a blow in March 2018 when he was diagnosed with a rare cancer which led to treatment in the UK.
He returned home after working in London on what would be his final film.
Homi Adajania's comedy 'Angrezi Medium' had just been released in Indian cinemas when the Coronavirus pandemic erupted, forcing the country to shut down.
On April 2020, Khan was admitted to the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital for treatment for a colon infection but died within 24 hours.
Reaction to Khan's death in his homeland was understandly one of overwhelming sadness with Priyanka Chopra, Amitabh Bachchan and the country's Prime Minister Narendra Modi all leading tributes.
Danny Boyle, Colin Trevorrow, Ron Howard, Angelina Jolie, Chris Pratt and Natalie Portman were among those collaborators in the West who spoke glowingly about his contribution to cinema.
Khan comfortably bridged two cinematic cultures in India and the West.
But he also bravely chose his roles.
He will be genuinely missed in and outside his native land.
(Irrfan Khan died at the age of 53 on April 29, 2020)
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