Shekhar Kapur

Shekhar Kapur in December 2008

Shekhar Kapur (also: Chandrasekhar Kapur ; born December 6, 1945 in Lahore ) is an Indian actor and film director and former model. Kapur is the first successful director from the Hindi film industry in Mumbai , who also made award-winning films in British and American films.

Life

Shekhar Kapur went to school in New Delhi . At the beginning of the 1970s he worked as a chartered accountant and management consultant in London, but soon returned to India.

He made his film debut as an actor in 1974 in Dev Anands Ishq Ishq Ishq. In the following years, however, he only appeared occasionally in films. He was a fashion model and made commercials. Since the mid-1980s, Kapur also increasingly worked for television. For the British broadcaster Channel 4 , he hosted the discussion program On the Other Hand. He appeared as an actor in several Hindi television series and films, but he never had an acting breakthrough.

In 1982 Kapur made his directorial debut with Masoom . The married drama with Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi in the leading roles was realized on a small budget. The life of a family with two daughters is thrown off course when it is discovered that the man has an illegitimate son. Without his knowledge, the son was raised by his mother, who has since passed away. His wife ultimately accepts the affair and the boy is accepted into the family.

Shekhar Kapur made his second film, the "curry western" Joshilay, in 1985. However, he gave up the project before it was finished. The finished version of the film, released in 1989, was credited to producer Sibte Hasan Rizvi . Kapur's other Hindi film productions were also delayed, which earned him a reputation for being a prolonged and slow working style.

With Mr. India (1987) Kapur had his first big public success. The film has numerous special effects and features the blonde dictator Mogambo, played by Amrish Puri , one of the most exotic film villains in Hindi film. He is defeated by a simple hero ( Anil Kapoor ) who has the gift of being able to make himself invisible.

In the early 1990s, Shekhar Kapur appeared as an actor in artistically demanding films by Govind Nihalani ( Drishti , an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes of a Marriage ), Mani Kaul ( Nazar , a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Gentle ) and Mahesh Bhatt ( Saatwan Asmaan ). In 1994 Kapur himself embarked on a new path as a director with Bandit Queen - away from simple entertainment films towards serious subjects and towards artistic films.

Based on the biography of Phoolan Devi by Mala Sen, he fictionalized the life of the bandit, who later became a politician, on the screen in Bandit Queen . After the movie Phoolan Devi of Ashok Roy from 1984 Kapur was the second, the Phooland Devis put history in scene. She did not support the project; Kapur was attacked by the writer and feminist Arundhati Roy , among others, for his “exploitative” handling of the subject and his ignorance of Phoolan Devi. In India, Bandit Queen experienced drastic problems with censorship , not least because of a frontal nude scene by the leading actress Seema Biswas . Regardless of this, this biography became Kapur's first international success.

His next work was Elizabeth , a historically incorrect film adaptation of the early life of the English queen of the same name . The title role in the eight-time Oscar nominated film was played by Cate Blanchett .

His 2002 film adaptation of The Four Feathers brought him the accusation in the English rainbow press of being anti-British.

Kapur co-produced the musical Bombay Dreams with Andrew Lloyd Webber with music by AR Rahman , which has been shown at London's West End Theater since 2002 and on Broadway two years later .

In 2006, he co-founded Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation with Richard Branson and Virgin Group, writer Deepak Chopra and entrepreneurs Sharad Devarajan , Suresh Seetharaman and Gotham Chopra, which aim to create new stories and characters for a global audience to have.

A year later, Kapur's feature film Elizabeth - The Golden Kingdom (2007) was released, whereupon the title heroine Cate Blanchett was nominated again for an Oscar.

In 2010 he was appointed to the competition jury at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival .

His mother Sheel Kanta Kapur is the sister of the Anand brothers Chetan , Dev and Vijay . Kapur was married to the singer and actress Suchitra Krishnamurthy from 1997 to February 2007 .

Awards

In addition to four Filmfare Awards , Shekhar Kapur received a National Board of Review Award and an IIFA Award .

In 2000 he was awarded the Padma Shri .

The asteroid (9141) Kapur was named after him on August 8, 1998.

Filmography

actor

• 1974: Ishq Ishq Ishq
• 1975: Jaan Hazir Hai
• 1978: Pal Do Pal Ka Saath
• 1978: Toote Khilone
• 1979: Jeena Yahan
• 1980: Bhula Na Dena
• 1981: Agni Pareeksha
• 1982: Bindiya Chamkegi
• 1985: Khandaan (TV)
• 1988: Swayamsiddha (TV)
• 1988: Falak
• 1989: Gawahi
• 1989: Udaan (TV)
• 1989: Mahanagar (TV)
• 1990: Drishti
• 1991: Nazar
• 1992: Saatwan Asmaan
• 1994: Bandit Queen
• 1994: Tahqiqat (TV)
• 1998: Elizabeth

Director

• 1982: Masoom
• 1985: Joshilay (completed by another hand in 1989)
• 1987: Mr. India
• 1992: Time Machine (unfinished)
• 1994: Tahqiqat (TV series; one episode)
• 1994: Bandit Queen
• 1995: Dushmani: A Violent Love Story (individual scenes)
• 1998: Elizabeth (Elizabeth)
• 2002: The Four Feathers (The Four Feathers)
• 2007: Elizabeth : The Golden Age
• 2009: passage
• 2017: Will (TV series)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Arundhati Roy : Arundhati Roy on Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen: The Great Indian Rape-Trick . sawnet.org. August 22, 1994. Archived from the original on April 14, 2016. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved April 11, 2014. 
2. ↑ Veteran actor Dev Anand dies of cardiac arrest in London in The Hindustan Times, December 4, 2011

Web links

• Shekhar Kapur in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Shekhar Kapur's official website
• Shekhar Kapur at IntentBlog
• [1] Arundhati Roy on Kapur's Bandit Queen
• Interview with 99FACES.tv