Actor who was a celebrated figure of Bangladeshi cinema after being discovered by the Indian director Satyajit Ray
Few performers’ careers have encompassed both discovery by Satyajit Ray and working opposite sometime Likely Lad James Bolam. Yet this was the distinction the actor Jayasree Kabir, who has died aged 73, achieved while shifting between the southern and northern hemispheres as work and family commitments required.
Launched while still a teenager in Ray’s 1970 film Pratidwandi (The Adversary), Kabir compiled a modest yet highly selective list of credits, including several key titles of Bangladeshi cinema, before making her final screen appearance in a 2004 episode of the BBC’s primetime ratings winner New Tricks, starring Bolam.
The Adversary – adapted from a Sunil Ganguly novel, and the first film in what became known as Ray’s Calcutta trilogy – found the revered Indian director pulling his cinema in a new direction and shape, seemingly under the influence of early Jean-Luc Godard and New Hollywood films. Emerging in the same year as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, to which it suggested an eastern equivalent, the drama pounded the city’s neon-lit streets in the company of Dhritiman Chatterjee’s Siddhartha, a disillusioned college dropout on a punishing quest for gainful employment and satisfaction besides.
