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In a decade spanning 60 films in which he played dashing leading men, charming supporting characters, and menacing villains, actor Motilal left a stamp on Indian cinema that many feel is being erased. Among the stars he influenced are Naseeruddin Shah, Amitabh Bachchan and Dilip Kumar. He remains best known for playing Chunilal in the 1955 adaptation, which featured Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala in the lead roles. But despite his popularity, Motilal reportedly died penniless and under-appreciated. “There should be a retrospective of his best work. Motilal should be studied in acting schools because he’s an all-time great,” filmmaker Sudhir Mishra told The Times of India in a 2015 interview.
Motilal was born in Shimla in the year 1910. He got his first break as a lead with the film Shaher Ka Jadoo (1934), but his first hit was Mehboob Khan’s Jagirdar (1938). He won a Filmfare Award for his performance in Devdas, but is also well regarded for the work he did in movies such as Sampat (1952), Anadi (1959), and Paigham (1959). “Not much has been written in praise of a great and very natural actor. Motilal was ahead of his times. Were he alive today, his sheer versatility would have ensured a place for him even now. In fact, he would be doing much better than any of us,” Bachchan wrote about him in the foreword to the book The Hundred Luminaries of Indian Cinema. In a 2023 interview with Film Companion, Naseeruddin Shah said about younger generation of actors, “It’s great that they’re standing on the shoulders of Om Puri, myself, Shabana Azmi, Smita PaTIL, Farooque Sheikh, just as we were standing on the shoulders of Balraj Sahni and Motilal.”
Motilal gained the admiration of none other than Mahatma Gandhi after doing a film on untouchability. Film historian Firoz Rangoonwala was quoted as saying by Mayapuri Magazine, “KL Saigal was a singer-star of heavy subjects and much bigger than Motilal, the lighter counterpart of fun-loving Bombay and its answer, Calcutta. However, by the early 1940s, Motilal was choosing bold plots too. He played an untouchable in Achhut (1940), a progressive film that won praise even from Mahatma Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel.”
Motilal was also known for his flamboyant personal life, marked by a love for gambling and flying. He is said to have lost a lot of money maintaining this lavish lifestyle. He was in a live-in relationship with Shobhna Samarth, the grandmother of actor Kajol and mother of Tanuja. “I have survived three heart attacks, an air crash, a near-drowning, and several rotten films,” he joked to the TOI in 1965, the year of his death at the age of 54. He was reportedly ‘penniless’ at the time, having made some bad investments and lost a lot of money on a passion project that he’d produced. The film Choti Choti Baten released posthumously. He received two National Awards after his death. The government of India issued a stamp commemorating Motilal in 2013.
In a 1963 interview, Motilal was quoted as saying about his final film role, “He has an air of ineffable sadness and, inside of him, he is full of goodness to the world—a world which hasn’t been all good to him, in which he finds ultimate dignity only in death. This is my most recent role but the one I have wanted to do longest. In visualising the Motilal of my film, a suburban philosopher, a man who is silently asking himself: ‘Where is peace?’ and is led on from corner to corner, I have borrowed of myself, of many echoes from all my yesterdays.” Incidentally, his final character was named Motilal as well.
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