Actors who glittered in '04

Best actors list is bound to be short if not sweet, says Saibal Chatterjee. View Pics

This certainly isn't going to be the most onerous task that one is likely to undertake this yearend. A list of the best on-screen performances in Bollywood films released in 2004 is bound to be short if not sweet. There weren't too many outstanding acting efforts - as opposed to mere star turns - in contention. It was a bit like looking for a pin in a haystack. My initial intention was to follow the crowd and present a Top Ten countdown. I have fallen short by two. Only eight performances have made the grade. Not surprisingly, a bulk of them has come from seasoned performers.

HT Image

Amitabh Bachchan as police officer Anant Srivastava in Khakee
During a year when the big screen was swarming with aggressive, glib and macho dudes in uniform, it was left to the old warhorse to come up with a truly high-quality performance that defined the very contours of the character for actors of lesser ability to follow. Few could. Such was the class of Amitabh Bachchan's interpretation of the psyche of a disgruntled police force veteran desperate for one last shot at glory in Rajkumar Santoshi's high-pitched expose of the politician-policeman-terrorist nexus. It was a performance that lifted an otherwise rather screechy film way above the ordinary. Mixing the sledgehammer blows that come naturally to an upright but miffed officer with the diffidence of a fatigued, asthma-stricken policeman whose career has been consistently unremarkable, Bachchan etched out a man who impacted the flow of the entire film, even as it held the narrative together.

Pankaj Kapur as mafia don Abbaji in Maqbool
Character actors are a terribly neglected lot in Hindi films. But when an actor happens to be somebody of the competence of the chameleon-like Pankaj Kapur, he simply cannot be ignored. He wasn't even though the film in which it featured, Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, was largely ignored by the masses. It was the kind of work that restores belief in the ability of at least some Hindi movie actors to handled complexity of characterization. Kapur plays an ageing underworld don with such a delightful blend of restraint and aplomb that every gesture he makes, subtle as it is, is loaded with meaning and logic. Maqbool had a clutch of great performances by all the other main actors in the cast - Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri and Piyush Mishra - but it was Kapur who towered over everyone else, thanks to the sheer realism he invested his role with.

Shabana Azmi as Carnatic singer Swarnalatha in Morning Raga
As with most character actors in Mumbai filmdom, life for 50-plus actresses in Indian cinema is a struggle. But not for Shabana Azmi. She is after all one of India's finest on-screen performers blessed with the uncanny knack of lending tremendous emotional depth and psychological veracity to every role she essays. Bangalore playwright Mahesh Dattani's Morning Raga, an English-language film set primarily in a south Indian village, bombed at the box office but those who did catch the film could not stop raving about Shabana's remarkable interpretation of the character of a Carnatic vocalist who retreats into self-imposed exile when she loses her little son and her best friend, a violinist, in a bus accident while on the way to a city to fulfil a long-nurtured dream to perform before an urban audience. The character's dream remains unfulfilled but, thanks to the stunning timbre of Shabana's work, the drama plays out like a dream.