Thespian Soumitra Chatterjee forged a fecund collaboration with master director Satyajit Ray. Their alliance spanned 14 films — Apur Sansar, Charulata and Ashani Sanket, to name just three — and drew favourable comparisons with two outstanding creative partnerships in world cinema: Akira Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune in Japanese and Federico Fellini/Marcello Mastroianni in Italian. For millions of kids and young adults, Chatterjee’s name was also synonymous with Ray’s Feluda, the razor-sharp detective he brought alive on celluloid.

The versatile actor’s work straddled a cache of genres and spanned over six decades. Co-star Sharmila Tagore once described him as a “banyan tree” that grew and continued to reinvent. His “Samapti” co-star Aparna Sen called him “forever contemporary”. Director Buddhadeb Dasgupta could compare him only to the great Balraj Sahni.

Chatterjee got introduced to acting at an early age, taking part in children’s plays at his ancestral home. His parents would use aluminium foil from cigarette packets to make his crown when he played the prince. He would often end up getting on-the-spot prizes from neighbours! This recognition, Chatterjee would recall, first stirred the actor in him. There were roadblocks, though. He faced rejection during a screen test for a devotional film and concluded that he wasn’t photogenic! Few know that he worked as a radio announcer and an LIC agent. Thankfully, he managed to get only one client in a year!

Had he managed to get more, Indian cinema would have lost out on some stellar performances — from the Charminar-smoking Feluda in “Sonar Kella” and “Joi Baba Felunath” to the grim taxi driver Narsingh in “Abhijan” or the effervescent Amal in “Charulata”. Chatterjee himself would choose “Apur Sansar” as his favourite Ray film since it reflected “the wisdom of innocence”.

His dramatic range was remarkable, as showcased in Tapan Sinha’s “Khudita Pasan” or in “Jhinder Bondi”, where he was cast as the swashbuckling horse-riding villain. In Asit Sen’s films, Chatterjee played “the kind of heroes that middle class Bengalis related to”. Then there were classics like “Teen Bhubaner Pare”, “Baksho Bodol” and “Akash Kusum”, among others.

“I feel that since I did these kinds of roles, people started taking my name in the same breath as Uttam Kumar. It’s because of this that Bengalis even tried to create a sort of Mohun Bagan-East Bengal kind of rivalry between us,” Chatterjee had said.

Like good wine, Chatterjee kept getting headier with age. Just when he was shifting to character roles, Saroj Dey’s sports drama “Kony” happened in the 80s. The film’s catchphrase, “Fight-Koni-Fight”, motivated generations of moviebuffs. Tapan Sinha’s “Wheel Chair (1994)”, Goutam Ghose’s “Dekha (2001)” and Atanu Ghosh’s “Mayurakshi (2017)” – he kept offering something fresh in every decade. But despite a rich body of work, top awards eluded Chatterjee. His only National Award for Best Actor came with Podokkhep (2008), nearly five decades after his 1959 debut.

What added to his charisma was his serious pursuit of theatre, love for literature, interest in arts and politics, and his undying love for Tagore and Bengali. Under no circumstances did he want to give up all these pursuits and shift to Mumbai to act in Hindi films. He feared that doing so would need him to give up “the rhythm” of his life – something he didn’t wish to.

Theatre gave him satisfaction. That’s where he could create “a complete artistic substance” with an admirable body of work adapting non-Bengali plays into the local context. A disciple of the legendary Sisir Bhaduri, his work on stage included “Rajkumar”, “Naamjiban”, “Neelkantha” and “Raja Lear”, among others. Such was his commitment and professionalism that while acting in the autobiographical “Tritiyo Anko, Otoeb,” Chatterjee continued performing on stage even after receiving the news of his mother’s demise.

Towards the end, a degree of stoicism was reflected in his work. Perhaps, it came from his philosophy about death not being “an assassin but a friend” who comes to relieve one from pain. Soumitra Chatterjee has left behind a treasure trove rich enough to be a true representative of Bengali culture.

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Kolkata: Soumitra Chatterjee was an antithesis of Uttam Kumar who ruled the Bengali screen when the former arrived on the scene. While Uttam Kumar was the conventional good-looking hero who romanced and emoted with a flourish, Chatterjee was a more understated and down-to-earth version of the leading man. If Uttam Kumar was spontaneous, Chatterjee was more cerebral.

“As opposed to Uttam Kumar, who often played the struggling post-Independence young man without a cultural lineage, Chatterjee represented the 19th century idea of a hero – good-looking, intelligent and refined. As the Bengali audience was rediscovering its stability in the late-fifties, Chatterjee fitted into a revived cultural space that he made his own. This explains why he was so successful in mainstream films,” said film scholar Sanjay Mukhopadhyay.