Saeed Jaffrey, 1929–2015

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Saeed Jaffrey was one of the few Indian actors who became as famous in the West as in his home country, and was equally loved for his popular comedies and his serious roles. He worked across theatre, film, television and radio, while taking equally seriously the role of bon vivant and playboy in his private life, as described in his 1998 autobiography, Saeed: An Actor’s Journey.

Born in born in Malerkotla, then a Muslim princely state in Punjab, to a peripatetic medical doctor, Jaffrey took his degree in English from the prestigious Allahabad University. He worked as an English announcer for All India Radio, where he began to write and perform, and joined a theatre group in Delhi, performing classics of English literature by Shakespeare, Wilde and others.

In 1956 he moved to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship to study drama, continuing to perform Shakespeare. He was accompanied by his fellow actor and girlfriend Madhur Bahadur, whom he married in 1958; they had three children before divorcing in 1966. Madhur Jaffrey continued acting and became a famous food writer, while Jaffrey moved to London, working for the Urdu section of the BBC World Service and taking other odd jobs until he found regular work in West End theatre. In 1980 he married his agent, Jennifer Sorrell.

Jaffrey’s first major feature role was John Huston’s 1975 adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, in which Michael Caine and Sean Connery play two British Indian Army NCOs who become kings of Kafiristan (Afghanistan). Jaffrey co-stars as Billy Fish, a Gurkha soldier who heroically charges a mob with his kukri (dagger).

Two years later Jaffrey played decadent nobleman Mir Roshan Ali in Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players, adapted from the short story by Munshi Premchand, about the 1856 British annexation of Awadh and the removal of its King, Wajid Ali Shah. Jaffrey’s character and his friend Mirza Sajjad Ali are so obsessed with playing chess that they neglect their wives as well as the larger political game of chess the British are playing around them. They abandon Lucknow, retreating to a village to continue their game as the city falls behind them.

Jaffrey played Sardar Patel in Sir Richard Attenborough’s multi-Oscar winning Gandhi (1982), and Advocate Hamidullah in Sir David Lean’s A Passage to India (1984). In Stephen Frears’s 1987’s My Beautiful Laundrette, he played a successful British-Pakistani businessman.

Britain underwent a ‘Raj Revival’ during the 1980s on television as well as in film, and Jaffrey played many roles in small-screen series, including the celebrated adaptation of Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown (1984) and The Far Pavilions (1984). A favourite of mine is the 1980 television adaptation of Paul Scott’s Booker Prize-winning Staying On reunited Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, 35 years after Brief Encounter, as an old British couple who ‘stay on’ in India after 1947. Jaffrey played Mr Bhoolabhoy, the hen-pecked husband of a hotelier set on driving out the Smalleys, and his wonderful depiction of suffering – despite his fondness for Howard’s Tusker Smalley, Mr Bhoolabhoy is unable to stand up to his wife – is typical of his ability to make a small part central and memorable even besides such celebrated actors.

Other British-Asian roles Jaffrey essayed include those in Gangsters (1975-78), Tandoori Nights (1985) – the legacy of which endures in the name of many British curry houses – and the long-running classic British soap opera Coronation Street (1999). On radio, one of his most celebrated performances was the 1997 radio adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, in which he played all 86 characters.

Jaffrey also worked in over a hundred mainstream Hindi (‘Bollywood’) films, ranging from Raj Kapoor’s Ram teri Ganga maili (1985) to more middle-class cinema such as Sai Paranpye’s Chashme Buddoor (1981), in which he was acclaimed for his performance as Lalla Mian, a paan (betel nut)-chewing shopkeeper.

My own memories of Saeed are very warm. Always charming and gracious, he was self-deprecating about his roles in mainstream Hindi cinema, and amused that I knew of them. It is disappointing that this actor who was so popular in so many genres received so little recognition in the form of awards. He was nominated for a BAFTA for his role in My Beautiful Laundrette, a Genie Award in Canada for Srinivas Krishna’s Masala (1992), and won Best Supporting Actor in India’s Filmfare Awards for The Chess Players. He was, however, made an Officer of the British Empire in 1995 – and following his death, tributes have come from even the Prime Minister of India, marking the admiration in which he was held: