Victor Banerjee’s Padma Bhushan honours a lifetime of achievement
Victor Banerjee had burst on the silver display screen in 1977 because the hookah-smoking Madr-ud-Daula, ‘prime minister’ of Awadh, in Satyajit Ray’s ‘Shatranj Ke Khiladi’, and he maintains that it was the largest break of his profession that has seen him showing in English, Hindi, Bengali and Assamese language movies, working with marquee administrators corresponding to David Lean, James Ivory, Roman Polanski and Ronald Neame, and nearer dwelling, with Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal and Ram Gopal Verma.
A winner of the Nationwide Movie Award for Finest Supporting Actor for ‘Ghare Baire’, additionally directed by Satyajit Ray, he’s the one Indian movie character to have gained the Nationwide Movie Award in three classes — the opposite two as Cinematographer, for his documentary ‘The place No Journeys Finish’, and as Director, for his documentary ‘The Splendour of Garhwal and Roopkund’.
In reality, ‘The place No Journeys Finish’, in competitors with 3,100 entries from 27 international locations, gained the Gold Award on the Houston Worldwide Movie Competition.
It’s been fairly an eclectic journey for Banerjee, who was born in a zamindari Bengali Hindu household and is a descendant of the Raja Bahadur of Chanchal (now within the Malda district of West Bengal) and the Raja of Uttarpara (in Hooghly district).
He turned down a scholarship to Dublin’s Trinity Faculty, which had supplied to confess him as an operatic tenor, however later he grew to become the lead tenor within the Calcutta Gentle Opera Group manufacturing of ‘The Desert Track’, and likewise performed Jesus within the Bombay Theatre’s first-ever musical manufacturing, ‘Godspell’.
Schooled at Shillong’s St Edmund’s Faculty, Banerjee graduated in English Literature from Kolkata’s St Xavier’s Faculty and obtained a Grasp’s in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur College.
In 1984, Banerjee portrayed Dr Aziz Ahmed in David Lean’s ‘A Passage to India’, which introduced him to the eye of western audiences. He was nominated for a BAFTA award for the function in 1986, and gained the Night Commonplace British Movie Award and NBR (US Nationwide Board Assessment) Award for a similar movie.
In April 1985, at a particular occasion in Louisiana, the place John Travolta and American TV actress Loretta Swit had been additionally honoured, Banerjee obtained the ‘Present-a-Rama Award’ from the Movement Image Affiliation of America as ‘New Worldwide Star’.
There have been different memorable roles too, as an illustration in Service provider-Ivory’s ‘Hullabaloo Over Georgie and Bonnie’s Footage’ and in Mrinal Sen’s ‘Mahaprithibi’.
And, as one recognized to talk his thoughts, Banerjee, on the units of ‘Gunday’ (2014) starring Priyanka Chopra, is reported to have snapped: “I’ve a kitchen to run” and “all work is a problem and due to this fact enjoyable”.
Banerjee has additionally appeared in quite a few Bollywood motion pictures, notably ‘Ta Ra Rum Pum’ (2007), ‘Apne’ (2007) and ‘Sarkar Raj’ (2008). Different important appearances embrace ‘Protidan’ (1983), ‘Byabandhan’ (1990), ‘It Was Raining That Evening’ (2005), ‘Delhi in a Day’ (2011), ‘Dev Bhoomi’ (2016), ‘Biporjoy’ (2017) and ‘The Reply’ (2018).
There have additionally been forays into politics. Banerjee unsuccessfully contested the 1991 Lok Sabha election in Calcutta North West on the BJP ticket. He garnered 89,155 votes and got here in third.
As an lively member of the BJP, he was important of the then Samajwadi Get together supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav’s suggestion that the karsevaks who had stormed the Babri Masjid previous to its demolition ought to have been shot.
He has additionally been extremely important of what he termed Punjab Congress politician Navjot Singh Sidhu’s pacifist angle to terrorism exported from Pakistan.
Born on October 15, 1946, Banerjee is simply 75, younger by as we speak’s requirements, and one sincerely hopes the Padma Bhushan will spur him on to larger heights.
