Sunil Dutt

1929–2005

Twenty-six films here, as actor, director and producer.

Padosan, in 1968, is the one that needed nerve. He had never done comedy. He plays Bhola, the man at the centre of a farce in which he woos a woman by miming to somebody else's singing - which means he spends the film being the straight line that everybody else is funny against, surrounded by Kishore Kumar, Mehmood and Manna Dey at full strength. It is the hardest job in the film and the least visible, and the film is routinely named among the funniest ever made in India.

Gumrah, two years earlier, is the opposite register: he is Rajendra, the singer a married woman is still in love with, in B. R. Chopra's film about a woman who marries her dead sister's husband. Sahir Ludhianvi wrote Chalo Ek Baar Phir Se for him to be sung at - a proposal to become strangers again, which is a much harder thing for a film song to carry than a plea.

Later: 36 Ghante, where he is one of the men on the wrong side of a thirty-six hour siege, and Watan Ke Rakhwale, where he is a jailer sentenced to six years in the prison he used to run, which is the best single idea in that film.

Dates and credits from Wikidata.