International Actor Irrfan Khan Passes Away At 53

In 1987, when Mira Nair was making Salaam Bombay, actor Irrfan Khan, fresh out of New Delhi’s renowned National School of Drama, was offered a role in the film.Thinking that he didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the cast, Nair decided to let go of his part. He ended up acting in a small role before reuniting with Nair for her 2007 film The Namesake; this time as the lead actor, as Ashoke Ganguly, the Bengali professor who immigrated to the USA. At the end of a two-year-long battle with a neuroendocrine tumor and several illustrious decades of an acting career, Khan passed away in Mumbai today. He was 53.

Irrfan Khan was born in the western Indian state of Rajasthan and grew up wanting to be a cricketer. When his sports ambitions did not materialize, Khan moved to Delhi to attend NSD. While American audiences were acquainted with his talent through films like The Namesake and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), his has been a career that has been international from its early years. It was in 1998 that he starred in Sturla Gunnarsson’s Such a Long Journey. Success, however, continued to elude him as Khan continued to work in Indian TV shows. Audiences growing up in the 90s in India were used to seeing Khan’s face appear in Chanakya, Sara Jahan Hamara, Banegi Apni Baat, and Chandrakanta, where he portrayed the role of twin brothers, Badrinath and Somnath.

It was when British filmmaker Asif Kapadia cast Khan in the BAFTA winning The Warrior (2001), that his talent finally drew the much-deserved attention of film festival juries all over the world. He went on to star in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart and Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. His successful crossover not only straddled the worlds of Indian and Western cinema, but also balanced the very different aesthetics and demands of the commercial Hindi film industry and Indian arthouse cinema. In the same year, he acted in The Namesake and the Hindi film, Life in a…Metro; playing an Indian-American professor in suburban America in the former and the loud-mouthed, flashy Monty in the latter. Khan’s range and screen presence were rare, as was the ease with which he inhabited diverse characters: a lonely widower in The Lunchbox; a diamond merchant in New York, I Love You; Baloo in The Jungle Book; a sado-masochist poet in 7 Khoon Maaf — a seemingly endless list now prematurely finite.

As Khan delivered unforgettable performances in films like Maqbool and Haider, filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation of the Shakespearean plays, Macbeth and Hamlet, he appeared in English films such as Jurassic World, Inferno, Life of Pi and The Amazing Spider-Man, and voiced the character of Simon Masrani in the games, Lego Jurassic World and Lego Dimensions. He appeared in the 2010 HBO drama, In Treatment and starred in international projects like the Swiss-French-Singaporean production, The Song of the Scorpions, which premiered at the 2017 Locarno Film Festival, and the Indo-Bangladesh production Doob that premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival the same year. After seeking treatment in London, Khan resumed work in India in early 2019. His film, Angrezi Medium, was the last film to release before Indian theaters shut down for the global pandemic.

An actor like Irrfan Khan is rare; not just because of craft but also because of the integrity he brought to it. Even at the height of his career, Khan worked with first-time filmmakers, encouraged young co-actors, and fiercely advocated for secular thought and freedom of expression. “Maybe, somewhere in the pursuit of winning, we forget how much it means to be loved,” Khan had written in a message to fans after his  post-treatment return to India last year. Today, with messages of grief and respect pouring in from all corners of the world, one doesn’t need a reminder.