Soumitra Chatterjee His Life in Cinema and Beyond

DeScriPtionWhen Soumitra Chatterjee debuted in Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar in 1959-thefinal part of Ray's Apu trilogy-a star was born in Bengali cinema. Soumitra soontranscended the boundaries of the Bengali film industry to become an internationallycelebrated actor who was compared to the best in the business, from Max von Sydowto Marcello Mastroianni. Famously known as 'Ray's actor', in a career spanning sixdecades, Soumitra worked with practically every Bengali director worth the name-Mrinal Sen, Tapan Sinha, Chidananda Dasgupta, Aparna Sen, Tarun Majumdar, Rituparno Ghosh and Goutam Ghose, to name but a few.Following Apur Sansar, Soumitra played the lead in another Ray film, Devi, in 1960.From then until the posthumously released Abhijan and Belashuru (2022), the morethan 300 films in which he acted rank among the best in Bengali cinema, andwon him a string of awards, including the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award(1995), the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1999), the Padma Bhushan (2004), theDadasaheb Phalke Award (2012) and the Legion d'Honour awarded by the FrenchGovernment (2018). But it was not just on the silver screen that Soumitra shone. Hewas also an accomplished playwright and theatre actor, a poet, a painter, the literaryeditor of the magazine, Ekshan, and an elocutionist.Soumitra Chatterjee: His Life in Cinema and Beyond, is the first comprehensive attemptto portray the life of the actor in all its facets. It traces Soumitra's initial years ofsearching for identities to the final decades when he reached the pinnacle of hiscareer as an actor and an artist. Written from the vantage point of someone whoshared an exceptionally close relationship with the actor, film journalist Amitava Naghas drawn an intimate portrait of the star thespian and his art beyond acting, whichwill be essential reading for his legion of fans, and for all those interested in cinema.