Page 15 - 23_Bafta ACADEMY_Om Puri_ok

“I was introduced to Jeremy Conway by Roland Joffe,” he recalls with a chuckle. “They said ‘Om, you should have an agent.’ I said ‘what’s that?’. In India you have these secretaries who look after your work, in the west you have agents. I said I didn’t know anybody, and they said they would get me one.
“Jeremy did say that he had been watching my work, and told me I’d done a wonderful job in City Of Joy but he couldn’t make any promises about the sort of work he would be able to get me because there weren’t so many parts for Asian actors.
“I just told him, my main shop is in Bombay where there is a lot of work for me. I said it would be very nice if something happened here, but I told him not to take it as a burden. If at the end of the year I gave him a call, it would only be to say Happy New Year and Merry Christmas, not insinuat- ing anything else. It would just be a courtesy call. He laughed. In the years since, Jeremy has man- aged to get me my roles in Wolf for Mike Nichols and Ghost In
The Darkness.”
The irony is that the more times Puri appears in TV productions like The Canterbury Tales or films like My Son The Fanatic, The Parole Officer and Michael Winterbottom’s upcoming Code 46, the more people will assume that he is based in the UK. “I love it here,” he adds, “and of course it’s not so far from home.”
Such is the lot of the character actor in the modern age. But Puri gives every impression that he is having a great time. Certainly he relished the twin opportunities posed by BBC’s The Sea Captain’s Tale – a striking, stylish and film noir influenced twist on Chaucer’s story – and the King Lear inspired Second Generation for Channel 4.
“When I read The Sea Captain’s Tale I thought it was a wonderful piece, very real and funny and something one could really identify with.”
In writer Avie Luthra’s atmos- pheric re-imagining of the original Canterbury Tale, Puri was cast as a successful Indian businessman based in England, a kind of Godfather figure in his community who reacts with violent rage when he discovers he is being cuckolded by his younger busi- ness partner.
It was a tough yet strangely ten- der performance that Puri pulled off to perfection. But the thought occurs, how would Indian audi- ences familiar with his work react to seeing him playing such a tough, uncompromising character?
“They wouldn’t be surprised at seeing me in this role,” he says, “because they’ve seen me in a variety of parts before. Back home they are very proud of me working over here. My image is of a gentleman. People know that I have come up the hard way; I’m not the son of a star, my parents were not part of the film industry, I have slowly and gradually built myself up, I’ve not come up the easy way.”
Indian actors in the UK hold him in similarly high regard, Meera Syal describes the grey haired actor as “the fabulous Om Puri” in her Radio Times preview of Second Generation, in which he plays a successful businessman struggling with the needs and demands of his three daughters.
And the plaudits dripped from interviews with Puri’s younger co-stars on The Sea Captain’s Tale too, with his duplicitous screen wife Indira Varma going so far as to describe him as a God. Puri laughs off the hyperbole like a man who has heard such things before, and feels embarrassed though very flattered.
“Some of that praise is a bit exaggerated,” he sighs, “it’s out of regard because I do take my work seriously. I’m not too modest to say that I consider myself a true professional. I respect my work and I respect other peoples’ too. Maybe that brings the admi- ration from my colleagues.”
photo: The Kobal Collection
photo: The Kobal Collection
With a career that ranges for Satyajit Ray to Steve Coogan no- one could accuse Om Puri of playing it safe, or indeed settling for second best. “I suppose things happen as they will happen,” is a phrase that echoes through the conversation.
Asked about his favourite English screen actor, Puri suggests a slightly unexpected candidate. “Alec Guinness was one of my favourites,” he enthuses.
“One of the things I admired about Guinness was his body. He could look like a pauper or a
photo: BBC
king. But if you look at Marlon Brando’s body, he can never look like a pauper, like a man who’s starved. His personality will always be in front, rather than the character’s personality.”
It’s a fitting description too, of an actor who is enjoying a very satisfactory Indian summer in his own career.
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