Tom Alter
Indian actor of US descent who became a Bollywood star
Tom Alter, an Indian-born character actor of American descent who spent his career playing Westerners in Bollywood films, died on 29 September at his home in Mumbai. He was 67. His daughter, Afshaan Alter Burtram, said the cause was skin cancer.
With light skin, blue eyes and blond hair, which later turned white, Alter was an incongruous figure in Bollywood. But he spoke Hindi and Urdu fluently, making him a natural fit for such roles as slick diplomats, British colonials, priests and police officers. “You name it, I’ve played them all,” he told the New York Times in 1989.
He appeared in more than 300 films and a handful of TV shows and plays. He was Lord Mountbatten in Sardar, a 1993 film about Sardar Patel, the freedom fighter who unified India as the country broke away from British colonisation. In Satyajit Ray’s 1977 Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players), he was the introspective Captain Weston, who, with his love for Urdu poetry, sympathises with the very rulers of India he is faced with overthrowing as the confidential assistant to a general played by Richard Attenborough. In Gandhi (1982), directed by Attenborough, Alter played the British doctor who told Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) his wife has died.
On television he was known for his role as the mob boss Don Keshav Kalsi in the 1990s series Junoon (Obsession), which, he told the newspaper the Hindu in 2005, was “by far my best role in front of the camera”. In 2008 he was given the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian honours, for his contribution to the arts. And in 2016 he gave himself the role he always wanted – a native Indian – when he performed a solo play in Urdu called Maulana Azad.
Thomas Beach Alter was born on 22 June 1950 in Mussoorie, Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand) in northern India. He and his older brother and sister were the third generation of Alters to live in India; his grandparents were Presbyterian missionaries who had moved from Ohio. His parents, James Payne Alter and the former Barbara Beach, were also missionaries.
Alter graduated from the Woodstock School, an international boarding school near the Himalayas, in 1968. He then attended Yale University, but dropped out to move back to India. He taught at a school in Jagadhri, and spent his evenings at the cinema with friends watching Hindi movies. It was Rajesh Khanna’s performance in the 1969 drama Aradhna (Worship), about a woman who is forced to give up her son at birth, that inspired him to become an actor. “I knew instantly that this was, above all, what I wanted to do,” he said. “I wanted to act in Hindi movies.”
He attended the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, graduating in 1974. His first major role was as a customs officer trying to break up an Indian drug ring in Ramanand Sagar’s Charas (1976).
In 1978 he wed Carol Evans, who survives him. Besides her and their daughter, he is survived by their son, Jamie.
In addition to acting, Alter wrote for several newspapers and published three books.
He often faced questions about his heritage. In 2013, at a media event for the miniseries Samvidhaan: The Making of the Constitution of India, a journalist asked how he spoke Hindi so well. “Friend, for 40 years I’ve been answering this question,” he replied angrily. “For 40 years I’ve told everyone that I was born here.”