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.
