Indian Actor Anupam Kher Has Key Role In New BBC Spy Drama

by Amit Roy

ACTING isn’t just acting. The Bollywood school of (over)acting, for example, requires very different skills from those required for the more understated style adopted in Britain.

But Anupam Kher, with 514 films, mostly Hindi, behind him, has made the successful transition from the former to the role of Shahbaz Karim in the new BBC drama, Mrs Wilson.

Ian Thomson, publicist for Snowed-In, the production company for the BBC show, explains why the 63-year-old Indian star was chosen for his 515th project: “Anupam Kher was picked because he is an absolute professional. We know his work.”

Kher has quite a few credits in British productions, often as a typical Indian father, Mr Bhamra in Bend Like Beckham and Mr Bakshi in Bride and Prejudice, both directed by Gurinder Chadha; and as Sathnam Sanghera’s father in the BBC adaptation of the author’s autobiographical tale of a Sikh boy growing up in racist Wolverhampton, The Boy with the Topknot.

Mrs Wilson, “inspired by real events”, is based on the life of British intelligence agent Alexander (Alec) Wilson, who had seven children with four wives but whose families did not know of each other until his death at the age of 70 in 1963.

During the 1930s, he worked for British intelligence in pre-partition India, serving as principal and professor of English at Islamia College in Lahore. He also wrote 28 well-reviewed novels, mostly spy thrillers, including The Crimson Dacoit.

Kher plays Wilson’s handler in Lahore in 1932. He turns up at the latter’s funeral in Britain more than 30 years later, telling his widow, Alison Wilson: “I wanted to pay my respects – (my name is) Shahbaz Karim. Alec was my best friend in India before the war.”

But he makes the mistake of addressing Alison (played by her actress granddaughter Ruth Wilson) as “Dorothy” – Dorothy Wick was, in fact, the English actress who Alec, a Catholic, had “married” in Lahore Cathedral.

Alison is confused enough as it is, because when Alec died of a heart attack, a woman had turned up claiming to be his wife, Gladys Wilson, which indeed she was. Alec’s three other marriages, including the last to Elizabeth Hill, a nurse whom he had met while working in a London hospital, were all bigamous. Perhaps Kher was urged to over emphasise an “Indian accent” in the drama – the BBC hasn’t quite worked out how to deal with the way English is spoken by Indians – but his character goes backwards and forwards in time.

The drama, which was shot mostly in Northern Ireland and has won rave reviews from critics, has cast Kher in a key role that is anything but stereotypical – an Indian in a position of authority in British intelligence in 1930s India, and then seen three decades later having a drink with chums in a gentlemen’s club in London.

I am sure Kher does not want to bite the hand that feeds him, but he does say: “For a long time in Indian films, you could make out a villain from one kilometre away. He would have the scar, he would smoke a cigarette, you knew the villain had entered the screen and something bad would happen.

He is glad the Shahbaz Karim role was challenging. “I come from a Hindi medium school; I think in my native language,” Kher points out.

“Whenever I do an English language film or series, it makes my job more difficult – which I love. Only when you have a difficult job you can give your best.

“My drama teacher used to say that when you are ‘competent’, you can never be brilliant. I have done so much work that competence comes naturally to me.

“When you do so many films back home, meet actors at parties or dinners, your body language become familiar to them.

“But Iain (Glen) or Keeley (Hawkes) or Ruth (Wilson) are strangers to me. The process of warming up to them is acting, according to me, because it looks real. That’s what I feel.