Naseeruddin Shah

Naseeruddin Shah came to film through the theatre and through India's parallel cinema, the low-budget, socially serious wing of the industry that ran alongside the song-and-dance mainstream. The earliest credit here is Manthan (1976), a drama about a dairy co-operative, and the decade that follows keeps similar company: Masoom (1983), Mirch Masala (1987), work that expected an audience to sit still.

What he does better than almost anyone is underplay. Shah does not raise his voice to take a scene, he lowers it, and the room leans in. In A Wednesday! he is the anonymous caller on the other end of a police line, and the performance is built almost entirely out of pacing and politeness. In Sarfarosh he plays Gulfam Hassan, a ghazal singer with a second occupation, and the menace arrives through courtesy rather than volume.

He never treated commercial cinema as beneath him, which is why the filmography looks so strange in list form. The same actor plays Gandhi in Hey Ram, Captain Nemo in a Hollywood comic-book adaptation, a costumed supervillain in Krrish and again as a special appearance in Krrish 3, and a police inspector in Maqbool, which moves Macbeth into the Mumbai underworld.

The honours line up behind the serious half: three National Film Awards, three Filmfare Awards, a Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice, the Padma Shri in 1987 and the Padma Bhushan in 2003. He has not slowed down either. Recent credits here run through Gehraiyaan, Kuttey and the streaming series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack.