Saeed Jaffrey’s screen reputation was very much forged in the west. After studying theatre in the US – where he was joined by his then wife Madhur – Jaffrey met the producer Ismail Merchant and was cast in a small role in 1969’s The Guru, alongside Madhur. It was several years, however, before he bagged his first really high-profile part, as the Gurkha Billy Fish in the John Huston-directed The Man Who Would Be King in 1975.
Jaffrey then appeared in The Chess Players, as one of the chess-obsessed noblemen of the title, in Satyajit Ray’s 1977 parable about the inability of India’s ruling class to oppose British expansion.
When his Chess Players co-star Richard Attenborough made his biopic of Mahatma Gandhi, Jaffrey played Vallabhbhai Patel, the lawyer who had a key role in India’s independence. Here, he talks to Attenborough about the film.
He then subsequently became “sadistic courtier” Biju Ram in The Far Pavilions, an attempt to capitalise on TV on Gandhi’s immense success.
Jaffrey became a fixture in western-made, Indian-set epics in this period: he also had roles in A Passage to India and A Jewel in the Crown. But Jaffrey also kept pace with the younger generation: he had a key role in My Beautiful Laundrette, the Hanif Kureishi-scripted film that detailed the immigrant experience in London.
Jaffrey had also been developing a parallel career in Indian cinema, appearing in copious films in the 1980s and 90s. Here he is in Suryavanshi, as Salman Khan’s dad.
And in Aunty No 1, a 1998 comedy in which he plays a colonel who has a yen for Govinda (in drag).
His geographical range was also increased by his role as Lord Krishna in the Canadian-produced fable Masala, which was partly a meditation on the Air India disaster of 1985.
Jaffrey’s output declined by the end of the 1990s, though he did have a short stint in Coronation Street. His last recorded credit was 2011’s Everywhere and Nowhere, from Kidulthood director Menhaj Huda.
