Opinion Through his frame

The British and American cinema worlds will mourn the many personas of Lord Richard Attenborough — the puny, barely-five-foot-tall actor in Brighton Rock (1947) with a menacing screen presence, the maker of epic movies like Cry Freedom, which placed itself in the messy middle of South Africa’s race relations, and one of the nicest people in the movie business, whose idea of giving orders was to drawl, “Entirely up to you, darling”. But in India, he will be remembered best for Gandhi (1982), a biopic on Mahatma Gandhi that took 20 years to make — and which eclipses his brilliant cameo in Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977).

It nearly didn’t. A suit from a studio dismissed his pitch: who would “want to see a movie about a little brown guy dressed in a sheet, carrying a beanpole?” Attenborough plodded on, the memory of his father’s great regard for Gandhi driving him on. He went, as he wrote, in search of Gandhi, making many trips to India, reading up on his extraordinary life, which he knew little about, besides knocking on all doors for funds. On the way, he mortgaged his house, sold his cars, pawned his paintings and did awful roles to raise the money. It would be the late 1970s when he found some backers, including the National Film Development Corporation.

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Even if later criticism would point out that Ben Kingsley’s Gandhi was more a superstar saint than the flawed man his own writings reveal, Attenborough’s film brought the history of the freedom struggle alive for an entire generation of Indians. With a stellar cast of Indian, British and American actors, from Roshan Seth to Candice Bergen and Rohini Hattangadi, it made it possible to imagine the bliss it was in that dawn to be alive — and the tragedy of Partition that would follow. Attenborough, as he himself would say, was no auteur. He was a storyteller who marshalled myth, drama and spectacle to tell the world the story of our freedom at midnight.