Word: actor
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...That's a question that applied to Khan too, but no longer. He has blurred the once sharp line dividing India's truly gifted actors from its movie stars. He is the one who can do it all: big-budget Bollywood films as well as small independent films in the U.S., Europe and India. Khan's specialty is adding a layer of unexpected depth and tenderness to an otherwise opaque character - the interrogator in Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire, a Pakistani police captain in A Mighty Heart, the remote immigrant father in The Namesake. Danny Boyle, the British director of Slumdog...
...Khan talks easily about movies - he loves them with the ardor of a lifelong fan - and almost as freely about his struggle to become an actor. He grew up in Jaipur, a city of crumbling palaces in the north Indian desert, as the eldest son of a conservative, aristocratic Muslim family. The popular movies he watched in the 1960s, such as Mughal-E-Azam and Guide, were pure escape - gorgeous fantasies of epic love and tragedy. By the time he was a teenager in the 1970s, the socially conscious new wave of the 1960s - so-called parallel cinema - began...
...Breaking Out Khan is not the first indian actor to win acclaim in the West. Before Khan, there was Naseeruddin Shah, a star of Indian parallel cinema's realism; Om Puri, co-star of City of Joy with Patrick Swayze; and Roshan Seth, who played Jawaharlal Nehru, the foil to Ben Kingsley's Oscar-winning portrayal of the Mahatma in Gandhi. All had healthy careers as character actors, but their potential as dramatic leading men was never really fulfilled, in Hollywood or Bollywood. "I feel very sad about it," Khan says. But he seems to have escaped that fate. "Everybody...
...Actors, too, have found a new model. There was a time when any young hero longed to be Shah Rukh Khan, the shimmying, flexing, weeping pretty boy who is still the industry's most bankable star, or Aamir Khan, the slick lead of the recent megahit 3 Idiots. Instead, Irrfan Khan has become the inspiration for all those talented actors who don't dance and aren't leading-man handsome. "It's very deep," Nair says of his impact. After watching Khan's performance in Maqbool, Sharma moved back to Mumbai and restarted his career as an actor. He recalls...
...Roorkee, everything Khan has worked for seems to come together around him. Sharma, the disillusioned actor, plays a sympathetic army officer. Dhulia, a director who once struggled to get his films made, has the backing of UTV, a thriving studio that specializes in multiplex movies. The young soldiers, some with wives and children in tow, follow Khan around the set, taking his picture with their mobile phones. After a few takes at the starting line, Khan has to run against several of the Sappers, who are extras in the film. His pale gangly legs don't quite match their tanned...