[His
roles in classic movies directed by Satyajit Ray won him admiration from
cinephiles and made him a hero to his fellow Bengalis.]
By Alex Traub
His
daughter, Poulami Bose, said the cause was brain damage and organ failure
brought on by Covid-19.
Mr.
Chatterjee, who appeared in more than 350 movies, rose to fame playing the
title character in “The World of Apu” (1959). The film, the third in Mr. Ray’s
famous “Apu" trilogy, cast Mr. Chatterjee in an epic role familiar from
canonical works of literature: A young man imagines a glorious literary career
from a shabby garret apartment in a capital city but then encounters the hard
realities of adult life, which he struggles to transcend.
The
role was Mr. Chatterjee’s film debut, and it catapulted him to critical notice
abroad and celebrity in India.
In
one memorable scene, while delivering a monologue about the novel he plans to
write, Mr. Chatterjee furrows his brow with intellectual severity, strikes the
faraway look of an imagination at work, pauses and points for emphasis as he
narrates the plot, and finally, with arms raised in triumph, smiles with joy at
the act of creation. The sequence appears to have the naturalness of
improvisation, but it was actually the product of laborious preparation.
Mr.
Ray’s son, Sandip, said he saw the work that Mr. Chatterjee put into his roles
when he peeked at one of the actor’s scripts. “It was full of handwritten
notes,” he told The Telegraph, Kolkata’s English-language daily,
in a recent interview. “Every minute detail of voice modulation, pause, look,
movement and whatnot was in there.”
For
“The World of Apu,” Mr. Chatterjee kept a diary in which he specified what Apu
was doing every moment he was offscreen. He brought the same intensity to “Charulata”
(1964), a Ray movie about tensions in an upper-class family set in 1879, in
which Mr. Chatterjee plays an aspiring poet and essayist. He spent six months
mastering the 19th-century style of Bengali handwriting so that the scenes that
depicted him in the act of composition could appear authentic.
The
young writers Mr. Chatterjee played in “The World of Apu” and “Charulata” set a
template for other characters he became known for. In Mr. Ray’s “The Golden Fortress” (1974), about kidnappers looking for a
long-forgotten treasure, Mr. Chatterjee plays a private eye whose ambition is
softened by high-mindedness and impracticality. In “Days and
Nights in the Forest” (1969), which follows young friends on a vacation,
Mr. Chatterjee’s businessman character is sardonic and self-confident but, like
the aspiring writers, yearns for a different life.
His
characters often wore a shabby-chic outfit of sport coats and scarves — even
when, in one movie, he briefly appeared as an ash-covered coal miner.
Mr.
Chatterjee had the ability to project guilelessness, sometimes as a naïf but on
other occasions as a selfless hero. His performance as Feluda, Mr. Ray’s riff
on Sherlock Holmes, enshrined the character as a standard-bearer of Bengali
cultural values. For a crime-fighting detective, Feluda was unusually
intellectual, the sort of sleuth who would blow open a case by discovering, as
he does in “The Golden Fortress,” a spelling mistake in a hotel register.
Mr.
Ray invented Feluda as a character in a series of children’s stories he began
writing in the 1960s, which he adapted into two movies starring Mr. Chatterjee,
“The Golden Fortress” and “The Elephant God” (1978). Since Mr. Ray’s death in 1992 at
70, there have been more than a dozen new Feluda movies with a succession of
new stars, but none have come close to supplanting Mr. Chatterjee’s portrayal
of Feluda in the hearts of fans.
Internationally,
Mr. Chatterjee attracted an admiring audience, but it was composed mainly of
critics and connoisseurs who followed Mr. Ray’s work and lived near theaters
that showed foreign movies.
The
New Yorker film critic Pauline
Kael praised Mr. Chatterjee as Mr. Ray’s “one-man stock
company” and wrote in 1973 that Mr. Chatterjee and his frequent
co-star, Sharmila Tagore, were “modern figures with overtones of ancient
deities.”
When
some of Mr. Ray’s early films were first released in the United States in the
1960s, New York Times critics called Mr. Chatterjee’s performances “strikingly
sensitive” and “timid,
tender, sad, serene, superb.” American filmmakers like Martin
Scorsese and Wes Anderson have cited as inspirations some of the
Ray movies that starred Mr. Chatterjee.
In
2015, “The World of Apu” returned to theaters across the United States as part
of a restoration of the trilogy. American outlets like Criterion have made subtitled copies of movies by Mr.
Ray starring Mr. Chatterjee available for streaming online.
Despite
the success of their partnership, Mr. Chatterjee spoke later in life
about not
wanting to be seen as “a Satyajit Ray puppet.”
And
yet the line between the two men sometimes blurred. While looking at Mr. Ray’s
early drawings of Feluda, Mr. Chatterjee remarked that the character resembled
Mr. Ray himself. “Really?” Mr. Ray replied. “Several people have told me that I’ve drawn him
with you in mind.”
Soumitra
Chatterjee was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in Krishnanagar, a small town in what was
then the British province of Bengal. His father, Mohit Kumar Chatterjee, was a
lawyer and a member of the Indian Independence Movement; his mother, Ashalata,
was a homemaker. She named Soumitra after a character from Bengali literature
and would, rather than sing him lullabies, recite poems by the Bengali
polymath Rabindranath
Tagore.
Soumitra
starred in plays held in the family’s courtyard, where bedsheets
had been transformed into curtains and the aluminum foil of his parents’
cigarette packets became crowns for him and his young relatives to wear as part
of their costumes.
He
avoided schoolbooks, but he was reading Tolstoy at 14. He skipped class to
watch movies not meant for children, but got caught when he overheard a
conversation between his parents about a particular scene and chimed in.
Mr.
Chatterjee moved to Kolkata to attend City College and graduated with a degree
in Bengali literature. He was inspired to become a professional actor after
coming under the tutelage of the Bengali actor and director Sisir Bhaduri, who advised him to understand the roles he
was assigned by scanning a script for subtext like a detective searching for
clues.
In
1960 he married Deepa Chatterjee, his childhood sweetheart.
After
Mr. Ray launched Mr. Chatterjee to Bengali superstardom and international
art-house renown, Mr. Chatterjee’s artistic ambitions expanded. He founded,
with a college friend, a literary magazine, Ekkhon (Bengali for “Now”), which
published the work of eminent writers like Mahasweta
Devi and illustrations and scripts by Mr. Ray.
Mr.
Chatterjee also wrote more than a dozen books of poems and wrote, translated,
directed, produced and starred in plays. He exhibited his watercolor paintings
across India.
Later
in his film career, he became typecast as a genial grandpa who upheld the noble
values of a bygone era in roles that were, by his own admission, “hackneyed” or even “detestable.”
“One feels sad for Soumitra,” one Bengali reviewer wrote.
In
addition to Ms. Bose and his wife, Mr. Chatterjee is survived by his son,
Sougata, and two grandchildren.
Mr.
Chatterjee, who was 14 years younger than Mr. Ray, regarded him as a mentor and
paid him a visit at his home every Sunday morning.
His
admiration was not “based on external considerations, like how successful he
was, how many awards he got or how wild people were about him,” Mr. Chatterjee
said in a video interview. “I could see his artistic vision right
before my eyes. It was a vast, universal vision. He had an ability to
understand all of life.”
