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Few performers’ careers have encompassed both discovery by Satyajit Ray and working opposite sometime Likely Lad James Bolam. Yet this was the distinction the actor Jayasree Kabir, who has died aged 73, achieved while shifting between the southern and northern hemispheres as work and family commitments required.
Launched while still a teenager in Ray’s 1970 film Pratidwandi (The Adversary), Kabir compiled a modest yet highly selective list of credits, including several key titles of Bangladeshi cinema, before making her final screen appearance in a 2004 episode of the BBC’s primetime ratings winner New Tricks, starring Bolam.
The Adversary – adapted from a Sunil Ganguly novel, and the first film in what became known as Ray’s Calcutta trilogy – found the revered Indian director pulling his cinema in a new direction and shape, seemingly under the influence of early Jean-Luc Godard and New Hollywood films. Emerging in the same year as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, to which it suggested an eastern equivalent, the drama pounded the city’s neon-lit streets in the company of Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha, a disillusioned college dropout on a punishing quest for gainful employment and satisfaction besides.
The 17-year-old Kabir, then billed as Jayasree Roy, was cast as Keya, the wide-eyed family friend who calls a passing Siddhartha into her family’s home to repair a blown fuse. Keya briefly lifts the protagonist’s head (“what is the point of seeing the darker side of everything?”) and offers him renewed reason to persist, even as he’s finally driven into exile. Her beguiling stillness contrasts with her swain’s restless agitation: as Kabir later told the writer Bulbul Hasan, Ray “expected precision, but he also made you feel that the camera would capture exactly what you offered – nothing more, nothing less”.
The film proved a success, winning three prizes at India’s National Film awards, including best director and screenplay for Ray. Yet Kabir admitted that this professional breakthrough owed a great deal to chance.
Born in Calcutta, she was the daughter of Santi and Amalendu Das Gupta, an editor and journalist respectively, who also owned and ran the Nirupama printing and publishing works in the city. Towards the end of her studies at the city’s South Point school, Jayasree entered the Miss Calcutta beauty pageant on a whim – “the event was being held in [the restaurant] Firpo’s, where my father had taken me for dinner” – and promptly won, catching Ray’s eye during his search for new faces.
“Winning Miss Calcutta opened doors,” Kabir said, “but it was only a beginning. Cinema demanded something different – something deeper. I was fortunate to meet remarkable people early on.”
In the wake of The Adversary, she continued to work in Bengali-language cinema, appearing in Dinen Gupta’s Ajker Nayak (Today’s Hero, 1972) and opposite local star Samit Bhanja in Ajit Lahiri’s Ek Bindu Sukh (One Point Happiness, 1977). Yet her most important films of this period were made in conjunction with the Bangladeshi critic turned director Alamgir Kabir, whom she met through Ray and married in 1975.
After collaborating on Surjo Konna (Daughter of the Sun, 1975), a romantic fantasy about an artist looking for love, the couple began work on the enduring Shimana Periye (Across the Fringe, 1977), a riff on Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 Marxist melodrama Swept Away, in which Kabir’s privileged Tina washes up on a desert island opposite a lowly boatman in the wake of a cyclone. The film was a notable success, winning four awards at Bangladesh’s National Film awards; Kabir’s lip-sync performance of the keening love song Bimurto Ei Ratri Amar – written by Bhupen Hazarika and sung by Abida Sultana – passed into regional cinematic legend.
A further success followed with the urban corruption drama Rupali Shaikate (The Loner, 1979), yet the pair’s personal and professional bonds had begun to fray. Upon separating from her husband, Kabir left Dhaka to return to Calcutta, before uprooting to east London with their son, Shourov. In the UK, she initially supported herself by teaching English at a higher-education college and providing voiceover work for the BBC and Channel 4. It was while in England that she learned of her husband’s death, in a drowning accident in 1989.
Adapting to British life proved a challenge, as she recalled in a 2003 interview: “I had cut myself off from acting and the media … I was finding it difficult to juggle a demanding career [while] bringing up my son as a single parent. Now, with my son settled in his career, I can consider projects which have long been buried in my mind.” She went on to take two further supporting roles on British TV: in the BBC’s white nationalism drama England Expects (2004) and in Painting on Loan, the second ever episode of New Tricks, in which she appeared huddled and scarred – and speaking Bengali – as the victim of a racist firebombing.
Thereafter, Kabir shied away from the spotlight, although she maintained a regular presence at and eventually became a patron of the Rainbow International film festival – held annually at the Genesis cinema in Mile End, east London – where she kept a watchful and nurturing eye on cinematic developments in her former homeland. As late as 2010 she noted: “It shouldn’t be difficult to improve the standard of Bangladeshi films with the aid of technology. Young film-makers need to take the initiative towards that end.”
She is survived by Shourov.
