Guru Dutt

Born Vasanth Kumar Shivashankar Padukone in Bangalore in 1925, Guru Dutt trained at Uday Shankar's dance academy before drifting into films as a choreographer and assistant. He was an artist first and an entertainer second — someone who thought about light, music and silence the way a poet thinks about words.

He broke through as a director with stylish thrillers like Baazi (1951) and Aar Paar (1954), and as a charming leading man in his own light entertainments. But his ambitions ran deeper than hits, and he was moving toward the films that would define him.

In 1957 he made Pyaasa — the story of an unrecognised poet, spurned by a materialistic world that only celebrates him once it believes he is dead. It was a devastating meditation on art, failure and hypocrisy, shot in some of the most beautiful black-and-white imagery Indian cinema had produced. It was a hit, and it is now regularly named among the greatest Indian films ever made.

Pyaasa was, in retrospect, almost autobiographical — a portrait of a sensitive man who cannot be at home in the world. Guru Dutt had found the theme that was his and his alone: the loneliness of the artist.

Two years later he poured everything into Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), India's first CinemaScope film — the tale of a great film director whose life collapses into obscurity and drink. It was ravishing, deeply personal, and a box-office disaster. The failure of a film so close to his heart devastated him, and he never again officially directed under his own name.

The cruel irony is that Kaagaz Ke Phool is now considered a masterpiece — its story of a discarded artist proving, decades later, exactly the point it had been trying to make. In his lifetime, though, its rejection confirmed his darkest sense of himself.

His marriage to the great playback singer Geeta Dutt was loving but increasingly strained, complicated in part by his intense creative and personal closeness to his frequent leading lady, Waheeda Rehman. He battled depression and drank heavily, and there were reported earlier suicide attempts.

On 10 October 1964, Guru Dutt was found dead in his Mumbai flat, killed by a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills. He was 39. Whether it was suicide or a fatal accident has never been settled. Either way, the poet of loneliness had come to the kind of ending his own films had imagined — and left behind a body of work that only grew in stature after he was gone.