He apologised for being late and said his wife had taken ill in the morning and had been admitted to hospital. I was disappointed, since I had very limited time in Kolkata.Ĭhatterjee stepped out looking confused and frazzled. He only spoke Bengali, but from what he said I figured that Chatterjee was not home.
SANSAR SERIAL DOORDARSHAN CAST DRIVER
It was hard for me to find Chatterjee's home in the Golf Green neighborhood of the city.įinally, the Uber driver dropped me in front of a large corner house. IMAGE: Soumita Chatterjee with Aseem Chhabra. Ghosh was busy that day, so I agreed to go on my own.
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One evening I met Suman Ghosh for drinks and quite by chance, he asked if I would like to meet Soumitra Chatterjee.Ī quick phone call was placed and Chatterjee agreed to see the us the next day.īut then he called back and changed the date to the day after. This past week I saw him in Director Anik Datta's new film Borunbabur Bondhu (2020), a charming satire where Chatterjee plays an octogenarian whose childhood friend becomes the president of India.Įarlier this year, I visited Kolkata for the first time to attend the Arthouse Asia Film Festival. I loved Chatterjee's heartbreaking role of a man struggling with dementia in Atanu Ghosh's Mayurakshi (2017). In the last 10 years that I programmed the New York Indian Film Festival, I got to see a few new Bengali films starring Chatterjee, including Suman Ghosh's Nobel Chor (2011), Peace Haven (2016), Basu Poribhar (2019), Srijit Mukherjee's Hemlock Society (2012) and the delightfully creepy short directed by Sujoy Ghosh, Ahalya (2015) where he acted opposite Radhika Apte. 'People like Mrinal da had to intervene and stop me by force.' 'I said I'll bury him right there and that I'm not Satyajit Ray and not a bhoddorlok like him.' 'I jumped at him, held him by his collar and planted a huge blow on him. Maybe he got frustrated at my nonchalance and he used an expletive at me.' I didn't get provoked since I didn't hold a brief to defend Ray. 'He ( Ghatak) had some very cheap habits he would manipulate and rib people. This is how Chatterjee described the incident to LiveMint:
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In the 1960s, there was a meeting organised by the Bengali film industry where Chatterjee was seated next to Ghatak. The soft, gentle actor that Chatterjee appeared in his films may have been different from the man in real life.Īt least, on one occasion, he got so angry that he hit the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak at a public event. 'Such was my love, respect and trust in him.' 'Had he asked me to be the doorman for a single scene, I would have agreed,' Chatterjee once said about Ray. Writing in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael referred to Chatterjee as Ray's 'one-man stock company'.Ĭhatterjee was always indebted to Ray for giving him a break and then casting him in a number of classic films.