Irrfan Khan

Irrfan Khan's first film credit is a letter writer in Salaam Bombay in 1988, a tiny part in a great film, and it was followed by more than a decade of television and small roles before anyone treated him as a lead. The break came with The Warrior and then Maqbool, Vishal Bhardwaj's Mumbai transposition of Macbeth, and from there he built a career with two halves that rarely touched.

In Hindi cinema he became one of the finest actors the industry has had, and the reason is stillness. He could hold a close-up doing almost nothing and let the audience do the work, which is why The Lunchbox, a film largely made of a man eating alone and reading notes, is as moving as it is. He was also funny, which gets forgotten. Piku and Hindi Medium are comedies, and he is the best thing in both.

In English-language film he was usually the dignified adult in someone else's blockbuster: the police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire, the adult Pi, the park owner in Jurassic World, the father in The Namesake. Good parts, mostly small, and he never condescended to any of them. He collected a National Film Award, an Asian Film Award, six Filmfare Awards and the Padma Shri, died in 2020 at 53, and was given the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award the following year.