10 Reasons to Remember Shashi Kapoor (1938-2017)

05 Tuesday Dec 2017

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Actor, Bollywood, Career, James Ivory, Top 10

Shashi Kapoor (18 March 1938 – 4 December 2017)

That Shashi Kapoor became an actor and producer should be no surprise given that he was born into Indian acting royalty. His father, Prithviraj, was a leading light in Hindi silent cinema, and went on to become a successful theatre producer and director. Shashi was soon inducted into his father’s touring theatre troupe, and it wasn’t long after that that he was appearing in movies. During the late Fifties he worked as an assistant director before making his debut as an adult actor in Dharmputra (1961). It was the start of a career that would span nearly forty years and see him appear in over a hundred and fifty movies (though he had a rocky start, with most of his early movies being box office flops).

Kapoor had an ebullient screen presence, and though he was often called upon to play the leading man, he wasn’t afraid to take a back seat when needed to some of his co-stars, such as Amitabh Bachchan or Sanjeev Kumar. For Kapoor his theatrical background ensured that the story was the main thing, and whether he was appearing in a Bollywood production, or an English language movie – he was the first Indian actor to move comfortably between the two arenas, and he worked particularly well with James Ivory – Kapoor’s commitment to the roles he played was unwavering. Even if a movie he appeared in wasn’t successful (and there were many), Kapoor retained his popularity, and his career maintained a momentum that, at its height, saw him appear in six or seven movies a year for a number of years. The Sixties and Seventies were perhaps his best period, but he continued to give good performances right up until his last movie, the unfortunately titled Dirty British Boys (1999).

In his home country he will always be remembered as the handsome leading man of so many Bollywood musical extravaganzas, while his appearances in the movies of James Ivory will keep his memory alive in the West. He had a much more substantial tie to the West, of course, through his marriage to the actress Jennifer Kendal, who he appeared with in Shakespeare-Wallah (1965). With her he continued the Kapoor family dynasty, and now he has children who work in the industry as well as various nieces and nephews. He made a couple of forays into directing, and could be called upon to provide the odd guest appearance in a movie from time to time, but it will be those traditional leading man roles from the Sixties and Seventies for which he will be best remembered, roles that showcased both his star quality and his commitment to acting.

1 – Shakespeare-Wallah (1965)

2 – Jab Jab Phool Kihle (1965)

3 – Pyar Ka Mausam (1969)

4 – Bombay Talkie (1970)

5 – Deewaar (1975)

6 – Kabhie Kabhie (1976)

7 – Junoon (1979)

8 – Shaan (1980)

9 – Heat and Dust (1983)

10 – New Delhi Times (1986)

10 Reasons to Remember Walter Lassally (1926-2017)

25 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Career, Cinematographer, Free Cinema, James Ivory, Michael Cacoyannis, Oscar winner, Tony Richardson, Zorba the Greek

Walter Lassally (18 December 1926 – 23 October 2017)

Walter Lassally’s family fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and came to England where his father made industrial and documentary movies. Following in his father’s footsteps, Lassally made his name as a cinematographer in the Fifties, working as part of the British Free Cinema movement, and alongside directors such as Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lindsay Anderson. These were short movies and documentaries that reflected the mood of Britain at the time, and Lassally’s involvement in them helped forge the partnership he made with Richardson in the early Sixties, and which led to a trilogy of movies about working class British lives (past and present) that brought both of them international acclaim. Following his collaboration with Richardson, Lassally reunited with Cypriot director Michael Cacoyannis, with whom he’d worked sporadically during the late Fifties, on perhaps his most famous work, Zorba the Greek (1964). Lassally won an Oscar for his work on the movie, and when he retired he donated it to a beach front taverna located near to where Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates famously danced together in the movie (alas, the statuette was lost in a fire there in 2012).

Lassally continued to work steadily after that, and was much in demand, but in 1972 he began another working relationship that would provide him with extra plaudits in the years ahead, with James Ivory. They worked together off and on over the next twenty years, and Lassally continued to provide the movies he worked on with a thoughtful and intelligent visual approach to the material, while also doing his best to come up with new innovative ways of presenting said material. And even though he officially “retired” in the early Nineties he continued working up until his last feature, Crescent Heart (2001). While not a household name in the same sense as some of his contemporaries, Lassally was nevertheless a signifier of quality if you saw his name in the credits of a movie. Thanks to his early background in shorts and documentaries, Lassally was always able to find the truth within an image, and provide a clarity of vision that always helped to elevate the material or the narrative he was working with. An unsung hero behind the lens then, but very capable of capturing sights that could provoke an emotional and an intellectual response in the viewer.