Bollywood will never find another Smita Patil

1. Bollywood will never find another Smita Patil To say that Smita Patil was one of the brightest female stars of the late 1970s and early 1980s would be a gross understatement. She was the consummate new cinema actor who could play the complex role of an actress physically and mentally abused by her husband in Bhumika (1977) or be an unapologetic part of popular films such as Namak Halaal (1982) where she’d be a natural at prancing around in the rain singing Aaj Rapat Jaaye with the Amitabh Bachchan with equal ease. In fact, amongst the handful of Indian actors who could find themselves at home in any decade and any kind of cinema with just about any filmmaker, Patil’s name would be one of the first to pop up and had death not robbed us of one of our greatest actors, Patil, today, at sixty, would have only become greater still. Great is an honorific that is far too readily, and even easily, attached to anything that is halfway decent. It’s a testimony of the times that we exist in where a couple of hits or a string of medial performances are enough to warrant greatness. But in Smita Patil’s case it’s a claim that has not only been rightfully bestowed but also in one of those rare instances, felicitously bequeathed. For an actor who has been dead for almost three decades now, which incidentally is also half of what her age would have been had she been alive, Patil left such an impression on the hearts and minds of the audience that very few actors both living or dead have managed to replicate. In a career spanning a little more than a decade, Patil worked in over 80 films, won two National Awards, one of them for Bhumika at the age of 21, making her one of the youngest recipients; a Filmfare (Chakra (1981), which also fetched her a second National Award) and was directed by filmmakers as varied as Shyam Benegal, Govind Nahilani, Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Ramesh Sippy, BR Chopra and Raj Khosla. Her performance in Mirch Masala (1987) continues to remain a master class in acting and it’s hardly surprising that it was voted as one of the 25 Greatest Acting Performances of Indian Cinema in the centenary year of Indian cinema. Patil’s acting and her real-life commitment to myriad social issues such as women’s rights, she was a member of the Women's Centre in Mumbai, often amalgamated and perhaps this was the reason why her commitment to both reel as well real was unfeigned.