Nana Patekar
Vishwanath Patekar was born in 1951 in Murud-Janjira, a coastal town in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, to a modest Marathi family. He was a restless soul from the start. He studied at Mumbai’s Sir JJ School of Art and wanted to be an artist, but fate gave him a small role in Muzaffar Ali’s Gaman (1978) instead. Ten years of struggle followed, through Marathi theatre and bit parts, until N Chandra cast him as the next-door ruffian turned avenger in Ankush (1986). By then, he was Nana Patekar.
The image stuck. Nana kept playing the rough-around-the-edges man, as anti-hero, side hero and sometimes hero, until Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989) brought him national fame. As the gangster Anna Seth, he was terrifying, and his final scene, burning to death in a fire, became one of Hindi cinema’s most copied endings. It won him the National Award for Best Supporting Actor.
He then turned from villain to the anti-establishment hero, always patriotic to the core and fighting corruption at every level, in Krantiveer, Angaar and Tiranga. Krantiveer won him the National Award for Best Actor. For his only film as director, Prahaar (1991), he trained for three years with the Maratha Light Infantry. He cast a deglamorised Madhuri Dixit and Dimple Kapadia, and the result remains one of the most underrated and finest depictions of army life, and of the trauma a soldier carries home after his duty ends.
For Nana, the uniform was never just a costume. His years with the regiment earned him an honorary commission as a Captain in the Territorial Army in 1990. When the Kargil war broke out in 1999, he was a National Award-winning star at the height of his career, and he asked to go to the front. The officers he approached turned him down and told him only the Defence Minister could approve it. So he called George Fernandes himself. When Fernandes heard about his years with the Maratha Light Infantry, he simply asked when Nana wanted to leave. That August, Nana spent more than two weeks near the Line of Control with a Quick Response Team and lost 20 kilos. He was later promoted to honorary Lieutenant Colonel, and he served until 2013.
Over the decades he played every kind of role, dramatic and comic. He broke his own image as an intense actor to play the absurd, lovable don Uday Shetty in the Welcome films, and he showed a quieter menace as the politician in Raajneeti. He won three National Awards, the Padma Shri in 2013, and several Marathi awards. He remains the only actor to have won Filmfare Awards for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Villain.
Away from the screen, he gave much of his wealth to Maharashtra’s starving and indebted farmers through the Naam Foundation. He often agitated alongside them, and he chose small villages over the Mumbai lifestyle.
Nana Patekar was 75. He died of a cardiac arrest this morning in Goa. He is survived by his son Malhar. He had separated from his wife, Neelkanti, years ago.
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