Sanjeev Kumar

Born Harihar Jariwala in Surat in 1938, Sanjeev Kumar came up through theatre and was, from the start, a character actor in a leading man's career. Astonishingly, he was willing and able to play men decades older than himself while still in his twenties and thirties — a choice that marked him as an actor's actor rather than a conventional star.

That range became his signature. Audiences never quite knew what a Sanjeev Kumar performance would look like, only that it would be true.

He won the National Film Award for Best Actor twice — for Dastak (1970) and Koshish (1972), the latter as a deaf-mute man in one of Hindi cinema's most tender performances. In Sholay (1975) he was Thakur Baldev Singh, the armless master seeking revenge; in Angoor (1982) he played comic twins; in Aandhi (1975) a politician's estranged husband.

Few actors of his generation could move so completely between tragedy, comedy and menace. He worked constantly with the finest filmmakers and co-stars of the 1970s, respected as perhaps the most complete actor of his time.

For all his warmth on screen, his private life was solitary. He never married; he is said to have proposed to Hema Malini and been turned down, and remained a bachelor.

He also lived under the shadow of a grim family pattern: the men of his family tended to die young of heart disease. His own father had died of a heart attack when Sanjeev was a boy, and both his brothers died young. He reportedly spoke of a belief that he would not live long — a prophecy the family history seemed to underwrite.

On 6 November 1985, Sanjeev Kumar died of a heart attack, aged just 47, exactly the kind of early end he had feared. But his death was not the end of his filmography.

He had so many films in production that new Sanjeev Kumar releases kept arriving in cinemas for years — the last of them as late as 1993, some eight years after he died. For a while, one of Hindi cinema's greatest actors went on giving performances long after he was gone.