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Saeed Jaffrey (8 January 1929 – 15 November 2015) was a British-Indian actor. His career covered film, radio, stage and television roles over six decades and more than 150 British, American, and Indian movies. During the 1980s and '90s, he was considered to be Britain's highest-profile Asian actor, thanks to his leading roles in the film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and television series The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Tandoori Nights (1985–1987) and Little Napoleons (1994). He played an instrumental part in bringing together filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, and acted in several of their Merchant Ivory Productions films such as The Guru (1969), Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie's Pictures (1978), The Courtesans of Bombay (1983) and The Deceivers (1988).
Jaffrey broke into Indian films with Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977) for which he won the Filmfare Best Supporting Actor Award in 1978. His cameo role as the Lallan Miyan in Chashme Buddoor (1981) won him popularity with Indian audiences. He became a household name in India with his roles in Raj Kapoor's Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) and Henna (1991), both of which won him nominations for the Filmfare Best Supporting Actor Award.
Jaffrey was the first Asian to receive British and Canadian film award nominations. In 1995 he was appointed an OBE in recognition of his services to drama, the first Asian to receive this honour. His memoirs, Saeed: An Actor's Journey, were published in 1998. He died at a hospital in London on 15 November 2015, after collapsing from a brain haemorrhage at his home. He was posthumously given the Padma Shri award in January 2016.
Jaffrey and his family moved from one medical posting to another within the United Provinces, living in cities like Muzaffarnagar, Lucknow, Mirzapur, Kanpur, Aligarh, Mussoorie, Gorakhpur and Jhansi. His father was a doctor in government service who was posted in many rural areas across the United Provinces and the family invariably moved with him. At the time of his birth, Jaffrey's maternal grandfather was the diwan (first minister) of Malerkotla State.
In 1938, Jaffrey joined Minto Circle School at Aligarh Muslim University where he developed his talent for mimicry. In 1939 he played the role of Dara Shikoh in a school play about Aurangzeb. At Aligarh, Jaffrey also mastered the Urdu language and attended riding school. At the local cinemas in Aligarh, he saw many Bollywood movies and became a fan of Motilal Rajvansh, Prithviraj Kapoor, Noor Mohammed Charlie, Fearless Nadia, Kanan Devi and Durga Khote.
In 1941 at Mussoorie, Jaffrey attended Wynberg Allen School, a Church of England public school, where he picked up British-accented English. He played the role of the Cockney cook, Mason, in the annual school play, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End. After completing his Senior Cambridge there, Jaffrey attended St. George's College, Mussoorie, an all-boys' Roman Catholic school run by Brothers of Saint Patrick. He played the role of Kate Hardcastle in the annual school play, Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops To Conquer. At Mussoorie, Jaffrey and his brother Waheed would often sneak out at night to watch British and American films at the local theatres.
In 1945, Jaffrey gained admission to Allahabad University where he completed his BA in English literature in 1948 and MA in medieval Indian literature in 1950. At Allahabad, Jaffrey learned about Hindu religion and mythology for the first time. While visiting his father in Gorakhpur in the winter of 1945, Jaffrey discovered the BBC World Service on the shortwave radio. When India gained independence from Britain on 15 August 1947 Jaffrey heard Jawaharlal Nehru's inaugural speech on All India Radio as the Prime Minister of India, titled "Tryst with Destiny". The partition of India caused all of Jaffrey's relatives in New Delhi and Bannoor, Punjab, to migrate to Pakistan.
Jaffrey was awarded his MFA in drama from the Catholic University of America in 1957.
Along with Frank Thakurdas and "Benji" Benegal, Jaffrey set up the Unity Theatre, an English-language repertory company at New Delhi in 1951. The first production was of Jean Cocteau's play The Eagle Has Two Heads, with Madhur Jaffrey playing the role of the Queen's Reader opposite Saeed as Azrael. Unity Theatre subsequently staged J. B. Priestley's Dangerous Corner, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, Molière's The Bourgeois Gentleman, Christopher Fry's The Firstborn and T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party .
After graduation from Miranda House in 1953, Bahadur joined All India Radio. She worked as a disc jockey at night. Jaffrey and Bahadur, having fallen "madly in love", dated at Gaylord, a restaurant in Connaught Place. At Unity Theatre, Bahadur and Jaffrey acted together in Christopher Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent, followed by Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Tennessee Williams' Auto-da-Fé, and William Shakespeare's Othello.
In early 1955, Bahadur left to study drama formally at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), a drama school in the UK. In late 1955, Jaffrey won a Fulbright scholarship to study drama in America the following year. In spring 1956, he approached Bahadur's parents in Delhi for her hand in marriage but they refused because they felt that his financial prospects as an actor did not appear sound. In summer 1956, Jaffrey resigned from his position as Radio Director at All India Radio. He flew to London on his way to America and proposed to Bahadur. She refused but gave him a tour of RADA where she pointed out a young Peter O'Toole and other English stage actors who would later achieve prominence. A few days later, Jaffrey boarded the to sail across the Atlantic Ocean from Southampton to New York City.
In September 1957, Bahadur and Jaffrey returned to Washington, D.C. where Jaffrey rehearsed for the 1957 – 58 season with the National Players, a professional touring company that performed classical plays all over America. He was the first Indian to take Shakespearean plays on a tour of the United States. He was cast in the role of Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet. He played Gremio in The Taming of the Shrew. BBC UK Desert Island Discs review of Saeed Jaffrey Midway through the tour, Jaffrey returned to Washington DC from Miami to marry Bahadur in a modest civil ceremony. The next day, they travelled to New York City where Bahadur was taken on as a tour guide at the United Nations while Jaffrey undertook public relations work for the Government of India Tourist Office. They lived on West 27th Street, between Sixth and Broadway. Between 1959 and 1962 Bahadur and Jaffrey had three daughters, Meera, Zia and Sakina Jaffery.
In 1958, Jaffrey joined Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio and played the lead in an Off-Broadway production of Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding. At this time, he met Ismail Merchant who had recently arrived from Bombay to attend the New York University Stern School of Business. Merchant approached Jaffrey with a proposal to put on a Broadway production of The Little Clay Cart starring the Jaffreys. Jaffrey took him home for dinner, where he met Madhur for the first time. In 1959, James Ivory, then a budding filmmaker from California, approached Jaffrey to provide the narration for his short film about Indian miniature painting, The Sword and the Flute (1959). Jaffrey provided the narration for Ismail Merchant's Oscar-nominated short film, The Creation of Woman (1960). The same year, he appeared in a limited run off-Broadway production of Twelfth Night at the Equity Library Theatre in the role of sea captain Antonio.
In 1961, when The Sword and the Flute was shown in New York City, the Jaffreys encouraged Ismail Merchant to attend the screening, where he met Ivory for the first time.Ismail Merchant, Laurence Raw (2012). 9781617032370, University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 9781617032370 They subsequently met regularly at the Jaffreys' dinners and cemented their relationship into a lifetime partnership, both personal and professional. The Jaffreys planned to go back to India, start a travelling company and tour with it. They would often discuss this idea with James Ivory and started writing a script in his brownstone on East 64th Street.
In 1961, Jaffrey was forced to give up his job as Publicity Officer with the Government of India Tourist Office. He went back to radio and joined The New York Times Company's radio station WQXR-FM, where his first broadcast programme was Reflections of India with Saeed Jaffrey. Jaffrey also took up acting on stage. The pay for such roles was generally $10/hour.
Within a year of Jaffrey's joining the Actors Studio in 1958, he was able to get Madhur admitted there too. However, they left by 1962 because they felt the criticism offered by Lee Strasberg was too much for their sensitivity. He played the role of the Wigmaker in a three-week run of a theatre version of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon at Fort Lee Playhouse in New Jersey. He appeared briefly in Rabindranath Tagore's The King of the Dark Chamber along with Madhur. From January to May 1962, Jaffrey appeared at Broadway theatre's Ambassador Theatre in a stage adaption of E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India in the role of Professor Godbole. In November 1962 Madhur and Saeed appeared in Rolf Forsberg's Off-Broadway production of A Tenth of an Inch Makes The Difference. Their performance was described by The New York Times drama critic, Milton Esterow, as "sensitive acting" that made up "the brightest part of the evening".
In 1963, Jaffrey toured with Lotte Lenya and the American National Theater and Academy to perform Brecht on Brecht, a revue which was seen in Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit. In summer 1964, Jaffrey along with some actor friends, created a multi-racial touring company called Theater In The Street, giving free performances of Molière's The Doctor Despite Himself in Harlem, Brooklyn and Bedford–Stuyvesant.
By 1964, the Jaffreys' marriage had collapsed. Madhur arranged for their children to live with her parents and sister in Delhi while she went to Mexico for the formal divorce proceedings. The divorce was finalized in 1966.
In early 1966, Jaffrey returned to New York City to play the haiku-karate expert Korean police chief Kim Bong Choy in Nathan Weinstein, Mystic, Connecticut that opened on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. In summer that year he played a role in The Coffee Lover, a comedy starring Alexis Smith that toured Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maine. Later that year, he recorded a narration of the Kama Sutra titled The Art of Love for Vanguard Records. It was listed by Time magazine in February 1967 as "one of the five best spoken word records ever made".
Back in London, Jaffrey was given the opportunity to shoot in India for the next Merchant Ivory film, The Guru (1969). He flew to Bombay in December 1967 and met his daughters after a gap of three years. He returned to London in the summer of 1968. He became the first Indian in a starring role in London's West End theatre when he played a Pakistani photographer in On A Foggy Day. In 1975 he appeared as Billy Fish in John Huston's classic film The Man Who Would Be King.
In the 1980s, Jaffrey won substantial roles on British television in colonial dramas The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions plus the British Indian sitcom Tandoori Nights, Little Napoleons (1994) and the ITV soap Coronation Street.
He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 2001 when he was surprised by Michael Aspel during the curtain call of the musical The King and I at the London Palladium.
In 1980, Jaffrey married Jennifer Sorrell, an agent and freelance casting director. Jaffrey converted to Christianity and attended Sunday service with his wife at St Mary's Church in South Ealing, where his funeral took place.
In 1998, Jaffrey published his autobiography, Saeed: An Actor's Journey.
His film credits include The Wilby Conspiracy (1975), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Shatranj Ke Khiladi ( The Chess Players) (1977), Sphinx (1981), as Sardar Patel in Gandhi (1982), A Passage to India (1965 BBC version and 1984 film), The Far Pavilions (1984), The Razor's Edge (1984), and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).
He also appeared in many Bollywood films in the 1980s and 1990s. For television he starred in The Protectors (1973), The Persuaders! Gangsters (1975–1978), The Jewel in the Crown (1984), Tandoori Nights (1985–1987) and Little Napoleons (1994). He also appeared as Ravi Desai on Coronation Street and in Minder as Mr Mukerjee in Series 1 episode The Bengal Tiger. "Entertainment | Saeed Jaffrey's journey", HARDTalk interview of Saeed Jaffrey, BBC News, Thursday, 6 May 1999.
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