Veteran actor Nana Patekar passed away on Thursday (October 8) morning after suffering a cardiac arrest at his residence in Goa. He was 75.
In a richly diverse career, darting from acclaimed crime films to comedies, Patekar assembled a gallery of unforgettable men on screen, from gangsters and cops to wily politicians and irritable taxi drivers. His early performances were appraised in terms of their intensity. Though he often shone as volatile, unhinged men with a temper, he was just as effective in deadpan humorous roles. Patekar’s legacy is distinguished by his astonishing range, by his ability to deliver polished, unsentimental performances that reached out and spoke to all. The preternaturally intuitive actor rarely discriminated between genre and taste. He was uniquely objective with his craft, approaching even his most emotional roles with a stunning clarity.
Here we highlight some of his most extraordinary performances:
In this landmark gangster film, Patekar played the formidable Anna, a powerful crime lord who dictates the destinies of two orphaned brothers in Mumbai. Patekar embodies Anna as a strange admixture of kindness, paranoia and sudden bursts of violence. The performance announced Patekar as an actor particularly suited for a certain character type. A searing scene where Anna freaks out at the sight of fire — tied to an old trauma — and his eventual death by the same element were among the film’s highlights. Patekar was actually injured filming the fiery climax, sustaining several burns and recuperating in a hospital for two months. The role earned him the National Film Award and Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor.
In the endlessly rerun Krantiveer, Patekar played Pratap Narayan Tilak, a disgruntled chawl dweller who becomes involved in a fight against corruption and communal violence. The role is demonstrably more theatrical and ‘massy’ than his work in Parinda. Patekar plays Pratap as a high-pitched emissary of civic doom. The film gives him several iconic speeches, bringing to bear Patekar’s training as a skilled stage performer. The film lives on in Indian popular culture as an ungainly extension of Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man archetype. The performance earned him the National Film Award for Best Actor.
In one of his most unsettling roles, Patekar owned the screen as the abusive and unpredictable ex-husband of Manisha Koirala in Agni Sakshi. The B-movie-esque thriller centres on a woman whose new marriage is disrupted by the return of her violent former husband. As Vishwanath, Patekar moves scarily between apparent tenderness and menace. It’s a performance of gathering foreboding and unease, and few actors were better suited for the gig. You can trace a lineage from Patekar’s hateful, unstable Vishwanath to Vijay Varma’s hot-tempered Hamza in Darlings.
Patekar had a knack for playing weary, hardbitten cops who operated outside conventional morality. In this definitive Mumbai film directed by Shimit Amin, Patekar played Inspector Sadhu Agashe, an encounter specialist famed for having killed 56 people in police encounters. This is, counterintuitively, one of Patekar’s more restrained performances. Loosely inspired by real-life cop Mumbai Daya Nayak, his Sadhu Agashe is a dry crusader, loathsome of cop heroics yet wryly witty and cool. Patekar delivers a telling portrayal of violence as a shrugging byproduct of procedure.
Patekar made his screen debut with a minor role in Gaman, a film about the hardscrabble existence of taxi drivers in Mumbai. Years later, in Taxi No. 9211, he gave Hindi cinema its most annoying cabbie. Patekar played Raghu Shastri, a frustrated middle-aged taxi driver whose day takes an unexpected turn when crosses paths with a rich brat played by John Abraham. Directed by Milan Luthria, this remake of Changing Lanes presented audiences with a fun two-hander. The film turns on two men from contrasting vantage points of life confronting their real selves. Patekar is perfect as the working-class anti-hero, playing Raghu as a grouchy, streetwise and financially desperate jerk. The actor drew on his blunt, argumentative speaking style that became his trademark over several films. There is, however, an unexpected tenderness to Raghu, visible in his scenes with his doting wife played by Sonali Kulkarni.
Patekar underlined his comedic chops with Welcome, playing Uday Shetty, a moneyed gangster who secretly aspires to become a film actor and producer. The role paired him with Anil Kapoor’s Majnu Bhai and became one of his most famous comic performances. The humour in the film stems from the contrast between Uday Bhai’s criminal bona fides and his increasingly elaborate involvement in his sister’s romantic life and the film world. Patekar stuffs his performance with deadpan reactions and an underlying innocence to Uday’s ridiculous schemes. He is especially a riot in a comic love song with Mallika Sherawat.
In Mahesh Manjrekar’s brooding Marathi drama Natsamrat, Patekar played Ganpatrao 'Appa' Belwalkar, a retired theatre actor whose relationships with his children deteriorate after he gives away his wealth. The character is a veteran stage performer who has spent his life performing Shakespeare. The film presented Patekar with an opportunity to mine on his own theatricality. Appa’s flamboyance and sense of injured pride give way to vulnerability. The performance earned him the Filmfare Marathi Award for Best Actor. The film ends with Appa dying on stage — a fitting epitaph, in retrospect, to Patekar’s own devotion to his craft.