Actor Farooq Sheikh dies

Published December 29, 2013

NEW DELHI: Indian actor Farooq Sheikh, the plump and unlikely hero of many Bollywood films, has died. He was 65.

Press Trust of India reported that Sheikh suffered a heart attack on Friday in Dubai, where he was visiting with his family.

Starting with a scrupulously understated career in 1973 with M.S. Sathyu’s cult movie Garam Hawa (White Heat), Sheikh played the role of a young man who preferred to join a worker’s rally in India when he was offered to choose to go to Pakistan.

The story of Salim Mirza, played brilliantly by Balraj Sahni, the ordinary Muslim who stays back in Agra after the partition, became popular in both countries for its balance between sensitivity and poetic irony. Ismat Chughtai and Kaifi Azmi wrote it.

Sheikh’s unimposing sense of timing in comic essays prompted Satyajit Ray to assign him the nugget role of a nephew who strikes up a sexual liaison with the cuckolded nawab’s wife in Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players).

Sheikh’s role unobtrusively underscored the decay and defeat of an era in a politically charged denouement that ends with the triumph of foreign rule over the kingdom of Oudh.

However, it was his chemistry with Deepti Naval, every cinegoer’s girl next door, and who played his sweetheart in several quietly successful movies that Sheikh will be best remembered for. Chashm-i-Buddoor was one such movie in which three competing Romeos chase Deepti, but only one wins her heart.

The role of washing powder-selling Neha played by Deepti in that Sai Paranjpe magic changed the destiny of a generation of Indian girls. Most of those girls named Neha would be about 30 today, that’s when the film was released, and the choice was inspired by the romance of Deepti Naval and Farooq Sheikh in that film.

Paranjpe used Sheikh’s controlled histrionics in another wonderful film – Katha, in which he played a romantic conman as a perfect foil to Naseeruddin Shah’s character of a simpleton. The heroine again was Deepti Naval.

Muzaffar Ali got playwright Asghar Wajahat to write one of the best roles Farooq Sheikh played in the small budget film, Gaman, (The Departure). The small town migrant to Mumbai (Farooq) was paired with the dusky Smita Patil in this tragedy about the alienation of workers in an industrial society from their home and hearth.

Ali again cast Sheikh with Rekha in Umrao Jaan. A tragic role in Bazaar, (The Marketplace) pitted him against the immensely talented Supriya Pathak and Smita Patil.

Sheikh appeared in very few commercially driven films but even there he left his mark with aplomb, for instance in Yash Chopra’s Noorie.

“God! Farooq Sheikh passes away! A true gentleman, a wonderful colleague! A quiet honesty about him. Very very sad,” wrote his colleague Amitabh Bachchan.

Shah Rukh Khan tweeted: “My biggest regret that I never got to spend time with you, Faroukh sahib, as I had requested. Should have done it earlier. I feel so sorry.”

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