Well known to film and TV viewers on multiple continents, the Indian actor Om Puri has died. He was 66, and suffered a heart attack at his home in Mumbai.
Puri was born in Ambala in 1950 (according to the story he officially settled on: he had no birth certficate) and grew up to attend both the Film And Television Institute Of India and the National School Of Drama in New Delhi, graduating in 1973. He made his film debut three years later in Ghashiram Kotwal, based on the play by Vijay Tendulkar, and continued to work prolifically in Indian cinema, across mainstream and more esoteric projects. He played a lot of tough cops, but he was versatile too: picking up particularly strong notices for his unusual role as a wordless victim of Tribal violence in Govind Nihalani's Aakrosh.
International audiences got a first glimpse of him in a small role in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi in 1982, and he began to become a go-to Indian actor for prestige projects like The Jewel In The Crown (1984) and City Of Joy (1992). But there were poporn movies too, like Wolf (with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer), The Ghost And The Darkness (with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas), The Parole Officer (with Steve Coogan) and The Hundred Foot Journey (with Helen Mirren).
In the UK he was perhaps most recoginsable as the first-generation Pakistani patriarch George Khan in Damien O'Donnell's East Is East (1999), struggling to adapt to modern British family life. He reprised the role 11 years later for Andy DeEmmony's sequel West Is West.
Remaining incredibly busy, his most recently completed films were the Indian dramas Lashtam Pashtam, Solar Eclipse, Tubelight and Garjana, and Gurinder Chadha's Viceroy's House for BBC Films. The latter is released in the UK on March 3.