Alyque Padamsee
Indian theatre director and advertising executive who played Jinnah in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi
ALYQUE PADAMSEE, who has died aged 90, gained prominence in his native India as a pioneering advertising executive, theatre director, actor and social activist; to the rest of the world he became best known for his cameo role as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning film
Gandhi (1982).
Padamsee landed the role by chance when he met the director at a cocktail party. “After a five-minute conversation, he rang me the next day and said you have an imperial air about you and this is how I see Mr Jinnah,” Padamsee recalled. “I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.”
He was quite nervous at first in front of the camera, “but Richard said, ‘Relax, Alyque, all you’ve got to do is not act! Just think the emotions but don’t portray them.’ He was dead right.” Padamsee was on screen for just 10 minutes in the three-hour film, and portrayed Jinnah as an aloof, dapper figure who used communal tensions to create a separate Muslim state mainly because he was resentful of Gandhi’s populist appeal.
The portrayal caused outrage in Pakistan, where the film was banned on the grounds that it had portrayed Jinnah unfairly. Padamsee himself felt there was something in the charge, observing that it had only shown Jinnah when he was confronting Gandhi.
The Pakistanis had other objections. In a public statement accusing Attenborough of bias, they complained that while other leading figures had been played by international stars, the role of Jinnah was given to an “obscure advertising executive” who had never acted in a film of any consequence before.
This was a bit harsh on Padamsee, a leading figure in Indian theatre and advertising, and ignored the point that both he and Jinnah were Gujarati Muslims, a factor which, along with his tall, cadaverous physique, lent Padamsee’s performance some authenticity.
Eventually, Pakistan announced that it would make its own film to rescue Jinnah from the Attenborough caricature, but the producers could not find a Muslim, let alone a Gujarati Muslim, to play the part, instead casting Christopher Lee in the role. Inevitably, the film got bogged down in controversy, not least over the choice of a man famous for his role as
Dracula to play the “Father of Pakistan”. The film was never shown in cinemas.
Padamsee never appeared in another film, turning down a role in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom, which he dismissed as “rubbish”. He was disappointed that he was not allowed to keep one of the six suits especially made for his role as Jinnah – they had cost £10,000 apiece. Attenborough did, however, allow him to keep the £10 monocle that he wore in the film: “I still have it and treasure it,” he told an interviewer in 2000.
One of eight children of a wealthy owner of a glassware and furniture business, Alyque Padamsee was born on March 5 1928 into a Muslim Ismaili family from the Kutch region of Gujarat whose ancestors had belonged to a caste of bards and court musicians. The family, originally called Charanyas, had moved to the Kathiawar region, where Alyque’s grandfather, the headman of a village, had earned the honorific name “Padamsee” after distributing his entire granary to the village during a famine.
Alyque’s older brother, Bobby, started the first theatre group in English run by Indians in Bombay, and when Alyque was seven he was cast as a page boy in a production of Othello. Bitten by the acting bug, after St Xavier’s College, Bombay, he was sent to London to study drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
Meanwhile, he had fallen in love with Pearl Chowdhry, a married non-muslim woman with two children who was in the throes of a divorce, whom he had first met at St Xavier’s College dramatics club. His mother was horrified and told him that if he wanted to marry her he would have to leave home: “I told my mother I’m getting married and left the house. I was about 22. I say to young people, live your karma, not your parents’ karma.”
To make ends meet he joined the Indian advertising agency, Lintas, where, after three years, he was appointed head of films. He remained with the agency until his retirement, serving as chief executive from 1979 to 1993.
In 1974, when working on a campaign for Hindustan Lever’s Liril soap, Padamsee commissioned the country’s first consumer survey to find out what women really wanted from a bathroom soap: “They came back with an astonishing finding. They said the housewife sings a popular Hindi film song while having a bath, and daydreams of escaping from the demands on her time. One of them said: ‘I dream of Amitabh Bachchan [the film star] coming on a white horse, kidnapping me and taking me away’ … I said: ‘Wow. The Indian housewife wants to escape’.”
Her shower in the bathroom, Padamsee reckoned, was symbolic of this desire, and he came up with an advert featuring a girl in a bikini frolicking under a waterfall with a bar of Liril soap. The “Liril girl” became a huge hit and the advert remained a favourite, through a succession of models, for 35 years.
Another of his classic adverts, Lalitaji, also for Hindustan Lever in 1974, aimed to help prevent the company’s soap powder, Surf, being undercut by cheaper rivals. After trying various approaches Padamsee remembered how his mother would think nothing of spending 200,000 rupees on a luxury but would haggle over one rupee with a market trader. “There is a difference between price and value,” she once told him.
He based Lalitaji, the disciplinarian housewife in the advert who always insists on value for money, on his mother, and through changing the situation storyboards he turned the adverts into a long-running mini-soap. Lalitaji become the most hated and most watched figure on Indian television.
Padamsee also became known for his public-service campaigns, crusading against dowries and for family planning, and shocking more conservative Indians with references to pre-marital sex and promiscuity in ads selling Kama Sutra condoms. In 1986, following a public service film about handicapped children, he became the first Indian to be voted into the International Clio Hall of Fame, advertising’s equivalent of the Oscars.
Alongside his work in advertising, Padamsee became renowned as the director of more than 76 plays and musicals, ranging from Shakespeare and Death of a Salesman (in which he often played Willy Loman) to Jesus
Christ Superstar. He also wrote several plays and won Lifetime Achievement Awards for his work in theatre.
In his home city of Mumbai, he was a member of a Citizens for Peace group which met with government ministers to discuss the violent Hindu-muslim riots which erupted in 1992-93, and helped set up committees to build trust between local residents and the police, travelling to London in 1993 to brief British officials dealing with sectarianism in Northern Ireland about his work.
He also set up an organisation to campaign against “eve-teasing” (public sexual harassment of women by men), was a founder trustee of an NGO for the education of slum children and served on a government Aids task force.
Padamsee’s first two marriages were dissolved and he was separated from his third wife, Sharon. He is survived by his four children.