There Was No One Like Irrfan Khan
The actor, who died yesterday at age 53, built a brilliant career and achieved a kind of global popularity with no precedent in Indian film history.
In 1986, when the director Mira Nair was scouting for her film Salaam Bombay!at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, she fixed her gaze on a young man from Jaipur. “I noticed his focus, his intensity, his very remarkable look—his hooded eyes,” she of seeing Irrfan Khan. Though she cast him, she soon decided that he was too towering at more than 6 feet, that he seemed too well fed to convincingly play a malnourished child. To Khan’s dismay, Nair pared his role down to scraps. “I remember sobbing all night when Mira told me that my part was reduced to merely nothing,” the actor . “But it changed something within me. I was prepared for anything after that.”
