Irrfan Khan, the Indian-born actor who achieved considerable success in Bollywood and the West, has died at age 53.
He had been admitted to the intensive care unit of Mumbai’s Kokilaben hospital on Tuesday with a colon infection.
In March 2018, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumor, but after extensive treatment he recovered well enough to shoot Angrezi Medium, the film which would turn out to be his last, and whose release last month was cut short because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Photo: AFP
Best known to English-speaking audiences as the police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire and Life of Pi, Khan was also a Bollywood mainstay, acting in hits such as Haider and Hindi Medium.
Khan was born Saahabzaade Irfan Ali Khan in Jaipur in 1966, the son of a tire seller, and went to drama school after failing as a cricketer.
He struggled to make headway in the film industry, despite being cast in a small role as a letter writer in Mira Nair’s 1988 Salaam Bombay! — to his frustration he only managed to find regular work in low-grade TV soap operas.
“I came into this industry to tell stories and do cinema, and I was stuck in television,” he said in 2013.
His breakthrough role came from the feature debut of then-unknown British director Asif Kapadia, whose low budget tale The Warrior was shot in India.
The 2002 film won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award for best British film.
Khan subsequently broke into mainstream Indian films, often playing cops or villains, including the title role of Maqbool, an adaptation of Macbeth set in the Mumbai underworld.
Khan also maintained a parallel career in Western cinema: He played the chief of police in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, and a police officer in the sensationally successful Slumdog Millionaire, which went on to win eight Oscars.
In 2012, he also played the adult version of the lead character in another Oscar-winner: Ang Lee’s (李安) Life of Pi. Other Hollywood roles included in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), Jurassic World (2015) and Inferno (2016).
Khan is survived by his wife Sutapa Sikdar, and sons Babil and Ayan.
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