To many Indians, Richard Attenborough, >who died on Sunday at the age of 90 , was the man who dusted the Mahatma off the pages of history textbooks and made him come alive on screen — if not with warts and all, then certainly with the great soul’s humanity intact.
Over the years, thanks to the empty rhetoric we are so fond of, so used to, the father of our nation had become some sort of dhoti-clad superhero, someone who raised his lathi and made the British vanish. Poof. It was Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi that made the Mahatma a man all over again — a very, very patient and perseverant man, who nagged and negotiated and argued, who walked and talked, starved and suffered, and slowly, over three hours, made possible an independent India.
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What Attenborough, a Britisher, did with
Gandhi was the giant oak that loomed over Attenborough’s career — the other films he directed, unfortunately, come off as mushrooms in its shade. It wasn’t for lack of ambition, though. Attenborough never made a lazy film in his life, with an eye solely on the box office. His directing credits include musicals (his first film Oh! What a Lovely War , A Chorus Line ) and action epics ( A Bridge Too Far ) but he remained fascinated by the prospect of chronicling the lives of the greats. He examined Churchill’s early years ( Young Winston ), Charlie Chaplin’s life ( Chaplin ), the relationship between CS Lewis and an American divorcée ( Shadowlands ), Hemingway’s experiences during World War I ( In Love and War ), and the friendship between the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko and a hard-nosed journalist ( Cry Freedom! ).
Long before he turned director, Attenborough was an actor. His early films do not dignify him with a name — he was “a young stoker” in
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Attenborough became a star after his first major Hollywood film, the wartime classic The Great Escape , where he played RAF Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett, the “leader of numerous criminal escape attempts”. In one of the film’s funniest scenes, an SS officer snarls at Bartlett, “If you escape again and be caught, you will be shot.” The joke is in Attenborough’s face — even as a younger man, he looked like the kindliest uncle imaginable, and to think of him masterminding prison escapes under the eyes of Nazis is hilariously far-fetched. It’s a brilliant instance of casting against type, and of course Attenborough’s character will go on to belie our initial impressions. But looking at him, at that point, you truly believe what William Goldman, who wrote A Bridge Too Far , said, that Attenborough was “by far the finest, most decent human being I’ve ever met in the picture business.”