Legendary Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor passes away at 79
NEW DELHI: Legendary Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor, the romantic screen icon of the ‘70s and ‘80s, died on Monday evening. He was 79.
He took his last breath at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital here.
Actor Randhir Kapoor, son of veteran actor Raj Kapoor, confirmed the news.
“Yes, he has passed away. He had kidney problem for several years. He was on dialysis for several years,” Randhir Kapoor said.
The funeral will be held on Tuesday morning, he said.
The enigmatic actor will be remembered will be remembered for his many commercial films, his commitment to the quality cinema when he turned filmmaker but also as the man who embodied ageless elegance.
“He was God’s, good man. He was such a beautiful human being beyond anything else,” director Shyam Benegal, who worked with the late actor in “Kalyug” and “Junoon”, said.
Shashi Kapoor was also effortlessly charming, whether at 25 when he was dancing around trees or at 65 when age and the famous Kapoor weight had slowed him down.
He was born an unprepossessing Balbirraj on March 18, 1938, in what was then Calcutta to Rama Devi and Prithviraj Kapoor, the son of a legendary actor who went on to complete the famed Kapoor trinity with his older brothers Raj and Shammi.
The tryst with cinema started in 1961 with Yash Chopra’s “Dharmputra”. The next two-and-half decades saw a dizzying lineup of films, some good, like “Kabhi Kabhie” and “New Delhi Times”, others like “Fakira” and “Ghar Ek Mandir” eminently forgettable, even embarrassing.
But Shashi Kapoor was not just a star, one more in an ensemble cast in the multistarrers that were the vogue in the 1980s or another face in a brain dead Bollywood melodrama. He straddled two worlds with his partnership with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant resulting in films like “The Householder”, “Shakespearewallah” and “Heat and Dust” early in his career.
The purple patch came in 1980 when he started his own company Film Vala, diverting some of the money he had made in Bollywood into making films with the likes of Benegal and Aparna Sen. The partnership resulted in gems like “36 Chowringhee Lane”, which saw his wife, veteran theatre actor Jennifer Kendal, as an aging teacher in a changing world, “Junoon”, “Vijeta”, “Utsav” and “Kalyug”.
Shashi Kapoor himself acted in several of these films - his roles as an obsessive suitor in “Junoon” set in 1857, as the brooding husband and father in “Vijeta” and as the suave, conflicted Karan in “Kalyug”, a modern-day adaptation of the Mahabharata, see the actor deliver some of his career’s best performances.
He was the star with no starry airs, the man who stayed steadfastly loyal to his wife through more than 25 years of marriage with scarcely a hint of scandal and the ultimate hero who always had a kind word for his fans.
Which other actor, in his heyday in the 1980s, would not just smile when a bunch of giggly, starry-eyed teens barge into his hotel room, but also welcome them in, take time to talk to them individually and leave them to handle things while he went into the next room for an interview.
After his wife Jennifer’s death in 1984, it was as if the very life had begun ebbing away from him too. The weight started piling, and the roles started dwindling.
Shashi Kapoor began fading away from the limelight.
He appeared in few films, as the corpulent Urdu poet Noor in Ismail Merchant’s “In Custody” in 1993 and as a narrator in “Jinnah” some years after that. He also revived his father’s Prithvi Theatre, a job now taken over by his daughter Sanjana.
Ill health felled Shashi Kapoor, and when he was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke award in 2015, he was too unwell to travel to New Delhi to get it.