Word: khan
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...This kind of character - the village boy who succeeds against all odds - is a staple of Bollywood, India's film industry, the largest in the world. But Khan turns it into something more. In his hands, the true story of Paan Singh Tomar, a track-and-field champion turned mountain bandit, becomes a parable about the frustrated poor. Khan says the film, written and directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, an old friend from drama school, appealed to him because it follows the hero once he has been forgotten. "It talks about our system," he says. "It's a sign...
...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...
...Bridging East and West The cliché about actors with great screen presence is that they always seem so much smaller in real life. Khan is the opposite. When he's in a scene on film, it's almost impossible not to watch him - but in person the effect is magnified, not diminished. He is taller and better looking than you expect from his common-man roles, and he has a way of subtly yet firmly controlling the environment around him. He doesn't need a big, pushy entourage to do it. When I meet him on the roof...
...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...
...guru Lee Strasberg or Stanislavski disciple Stella Adler to give actors tools and techniques. It had its roots in drawing-room melodramas and classical literature, including an ancient text, the Natyashastra, devoted to the theory of drama. "It even tells you where in the audience a critic should sit," Khan says. "But you cannot learn acting from that." So he immersed himself in the films of Scorsese, Costa-Gavras and Bergman, and watched Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Marlon Brando over and over, trying to work out for himself how they do what they do. (See best movies...