Celebrity Biographies
ompuri
Born on October 18, 1950, in Ambala, Haryana, in northern India, Om Rajesh Puri belongs to a family from Punjab, a border region with Pakistan. He graduated from the Indian Film and Television Institute, and then also enrolled in the National School of Dramatic Art. The actor has died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 66.
He made his film debut in 1976 with Grashiram Kotwal , by director Marathi, a role for which he was paid “with peanuts”, as he recalled. He was followed by numerous films that, as usual in those latitudes, had little impact outside of India, but which made him popular, especially Ardh Satya , where he played a police inspector, a role for which he won the National Award for Best Actor. , but also Disco Dancer , where he had to give life to the manager of a dancer.
He worked for the first time in an international production of Gandhi , shot in his country by the British Richard Attenborough, who gave him the brief role of Narahi, a father grieving that his son had been killed by Muslims. But later he continued shooting Indian films at a good pace, such as Goraa, Susman or Shagun .
In 1992, he shared the screen with Patrick Swayze , in The City of Joy , an adaptation of the novel by Dominique Lapierre , directed by Roland Joffé . She played a family man who travels with his family to Calcutta, looking for work, and picks up the protagonist, injured after suffering a robbery. In The Demons of the Night , with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas , he was Abdullah, foreman of a group of workers.
Possibly Om Puri’s best work outside of India was Orient Is Orient , where he played George Khan, a Pakistani emigrant, manager of a fish & chip shop in Manchester, who despairs of giving his seven children a traditional education, but they are highly influenced by European customs. He reprized the role more than a decade later in the West is the West , the ill-fated sequel.
In recent years, Om Puri has continued in his line, combining Indian cinema with some foreign title, such as The Parole Agent or Charlie Wilson’s War . He has stood out above all facing Helen Mirren , in A Journey of Ten Meters , where he was the father of the Kadams, an Indian family that, upon emigrating to the south of France, open a restaurant in front of a luxurious French haute cuisine establishment with a star Michelin.
Divorced from Seema Kapoor, in 2009 he joined Nandita Puri, with whom he has a son, Ishaan. She published “Unlikely Hero: The Story of Om Puri”, a complete biography of the interpreter. In 2004 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire.