Johny Lever was asleep in his vanity van when he felt someone touch his feet and massage his leg. He looked up to find Nana Patekar. His make-up man and spot boy watched, astonished that the formidable actor had begun tending to a colleague. “He said, ‘You sleep, don’t get up,’” Lever recalls.

It is this memory that returns as Lever absorbs Patekar’s death in Goa on October 8, aged 75. The actor who could terrify audiences in Parinda (1989), rouse them in Krantiveer (1994) and make them laugh as Uday Shetty in Welcome (2007) was an attentive friend. He called, checked on them and invited them home. “Every 15 days or a month, I would get a call from him,” Lever tells me.

That affection had been there from their first meeting, at an industry event at the Taj hosted by Balasaheb Thackeray. Patekar approached Lever with enthusiastic praise for his work. Their friendship gave Lever a different understanding of the actor’s much-discussed temper. “Whatever was in his heart, he would speak it right to your face,” he says.

The same lack of pretence marked his generosity. Lever remembers Patekar’s support for Baba Amte’s Anandwan, the community for people affected by leprosy and other disabilities. “Nana used to give three-quarters of his earnings to Baba Amte’s Anandwan,” he says, recalling help offered without publicity. “That man was very unique. He had a heart like a saint.”

For director Anil Mattoo, that instinct to help became personal after his brother Sharad died of a heart attack last year. Patekar called and supplied a doctor’s contact in Pune, should Mattoo need one. “He would pick up my phone in a minute,” he says. It was the reassurance of a friendship stretching back four decades, to a time when Mattoo was championing Patekar’s talent.

Mattoo had seen him in the Marathi play Purush and recommended him for a role in N Chandra’s Ankush (1986), originally intended for Ravindra Mahajani. The film’s unemployed young men needed an actor who could make their frustration convincing. “He was a powerhouse with raw energy,” Mattoo says.

That energy was tested on a production with little money. Mattoo remembers fight scenes with real bottles and no fight master; Sunil Dutt, watching, wondered whether the actors intended to make another film. By Yeshwant (1997), Mattoo was directing Patekar himself, drawing on his conviction to portray an honest policeman confronting corruption.

The famous “Ek machhar…” sequence grew out of that conviction. Patekar suggested the line, Mattoo says, and lyricist Sameer developed it into a song. When Farah Khan heard the track, she wondered what she could choreograph to it; Mattoo eventually directed the sequence himself. Its force, he felt, came from the honesty of Patekar’s delivery.

The collaboration left Mattoo eager to return to Yeshwant with a remake or sequel. There was no finished subject, and Patekar had not signed, but Mattoo felt sure he would consider it. “He never refused a film offer from me,” he says.

That readiness to back an idea extended beyond cinema. Classical vocalist Rahul Deshpande remembers proposing a national audience for Vasantotsav, the festival honouring his grandfather, Vasantrao Deshpande. Patekar, whose affection for Vasantrao had extended to Rahul, replied, “We will take it to the international level.” He involved himself in the smallest details, treating it as a family occasion.

Deshpande valued his perceptive observations on ghazals, natyasangeet and ragas, but learnt most from watching how he lived. “His concern for farmers, drought-affected families and people in distress was not something he merely spoke about; he acted on it,” he says. The NAAM Foundation, founded with Makarand Anaspure in 2015, gave that concern a continuing purpose.

Producer Firoz Nadiadwala had discussed joining Patekar in that work for farmers. They also had films in mind, but their friendship, begun in 1990, preceded their professional association on Welcome. “I will not say he was, he is my elder brother,” Nadiadwala says.

That closeness allowed blunt conversations over meals at Patekar’s Khadakwasla farmhouse. Patekar would laugh and ask, “Kaisa baat karta hai re tu?” They had spoken only the previous evening and expected to meet in Mumbai shortly. “He was normal, everything was okay,” Nadiadwala says.

He treasures a photograph of Patekar with his three children, taken at their office last year. “For me, he is always going to be there,” he says. “It’s just that I won’t see him.” Lever cannot stop thinking about his friend either. Audiences will remember a voice that commanded attention; those who knew him will remember how readily he gave them his.