He was to Satyajit Ray what Jean-Paul Belmondo was to Jean-Luc Godard (or the French New Wave) or Toshiro Mifune was to Akira Kurosawa. There must have been a good enough reason why Soumitra Chatterjee, who died due to COVID-19 on November 15, acted in 14 of Ray’s feature films – but then the 85-year-old colossus of Indian cinema was much more than that.

A recipient of Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2012, the highest honour in Indian cinema, not to speak of Legion of Honour by the French government – Chatterjee (or ‘Chattopadhyay’ as the quintessential Bengali bhadralok would say) was one of his kind. If entertaining the audience of Bengali cinema for nearly six decades – starting from Ray to the recent breed of filmmakers like a Moinak Bhowmik is what he was best known for – he was also Bengal’s Renaissance Man in the true sense of the term in the mould of Nobel laureate Rabindra Nath Tagore and Ray.

Where else can you find a cinema actor who is also a poet – with over a dozen poetry books to his credit – an essayist, a playwright with over 15 adaptations, a theatre director and performer of more than 30 productions, an elocution artist, a painter and an editor for two decades of Ekshan, one of Bengal’s most respected but now defunct literary magazine. As he himself often candidly admitted, acting in movies may have provided him the bread and butter but theatre and literature remained two of his first loves.