The Stage

Global appeal - Kabir Bedi

Published Monday 5 September 2005 at 13:10 by Nick Awde

Currently starring in The Far Pavilions, which closes after five months in the West End, international actor Kabir Bedi has also appeared in numerous theatre, film and television roles. Nick Awde discovers how the son of a communist Sikh philosopher and a Buddhist nun made his way as a Bollywood star

Although busy on three continents with film and television work, Kabir Bedi has always found time to return to the stage, if not as frequently as he would wish.

“There is no greater joy than being on the stage because everything’s working for you,” says the Lahore-born actor. “The lights are on you, the audience is there, it’s an uninterrupted performance. In film it’s constant interruption - you’re shooting back to front, you’re on different locations, people holding tape measures to your nose.”

After a five-year career making commercials behind the camera in Bombay for the likes of Ogilvy & Mather, Bedi instead found himself doing more and more work performing in the city’s bustling theatre industry. But Bombay’s theatre, high profile as it is, does not always pay the bills and so Bedi turned to film and television in India and then abroad in order to earn the wherewithal to do the occasional play.

“If you average it out, I probably do theatre once every eight to ten years but I try to make it a major play and to make it a major event.”

Currently he is starring in The Far Pavilions at the Shaftesbury Theatre - now, unfortunately, forced to post early closure notices. The show has marked Bedi’s West End debut.

“That’s an interesting story in itself. A little over 20 years ago The Far Pavilions was made into a mini-series by HBO. I was offered the same role, that of Khan Sahib - it’s a central part, one that anchors the story in so many ways. He is a fascinating character to play. But I was shooting the Bond film Octopussy at the time and it overshot, so I couldn’t do the role. They signed Omar Sharif instead. I was deeply disappointed, so when I was asked to play the role in the musical version, I leapt at the opportunity.”

Bedi was born in Lahore, then part of India before Partition. “My mother was a Derbyshire girl, who met my father when they were both studying at Oxford. They married at the registry office there and then went back to India to fight the British.”

His father Baba was a communist, while mother Freda was one of Gandhi’s hand-picked followers. In the years that followed Indian independence in 1947, both in their own ways went on spiritual paths - Baba becoming a Sikh philosopher and Freda a pioneering Tibetan Buddhist nun. The sitting room of their home became a unique learning zone for their son, where artists, writers, poets, film-makers, thinkers, ex-communists, revolutionaries and spiritualists of every description would turn up.

Realising that acting was where his own destiny was leading him, it rapidly became his driving force - first in India and Italy, then briefly in England with films such as Thief of Baghdad and Octopussy and 12 years during the eighties and nineties in American television. “And then I went back to Bollywood and then returned to Hollywood - it’s been the itinerant life of an international actor.

“The last play I did was Othello, directed in Bombay by Indian Alyque Padamsee, who is one of Asia’s leading theatre directors. It was an interesting Othello because there were various Eastern elements put into it - he returns to his Moorish roots when in crisis and almost goes back to flagellating himself in a Muslim tradition of atonement.”

It was through an earlier Bombay play, Tughlagh, in 1971, that Bedi made his first impact as the pre-Mughal king of the title, a visionary who was regarded as mad. The drama, penned by top playwrght Girish Karnad, was a huge hit and led all kinds of producers to its young star.

And yet, with such lengthy periods away, it comes as no surprise that Bedi sees going back to the stage as something of an experience. “The grammar of film is different from that of theatre, so you tend to forget some of the techniques of theatre. It comes back very quickly.”

The director of The Far Pavilions is Gale Edwards, who did Jesus Christ Superstar, among other RUG shows, and who has also worked with Trevor Nunn on productions of Les Miserables. Working with her was like attending a masterclass in musical theatre for Bedi.

“It was a steep learning curve because I had three films to finish before I began. The theatre, however, prides itself on the fact that we don’t kowtow to stars. And yet you find yourself jumping from a situation where you are in an air-conditioned trailer with assistants waiting on you to sitting in a hallway without a chair to your name while rehearsals are going on.”

The most recent of his 140-odd films and TV series include the Italian comedy, andata+ritorno, directed by Marco Ponti, and a Bend It Like Beckham-style film called Take Three Girls, an Anglo-Indian feature which should be out later this year. Also soon to be released is Taj Mahal - An Eternal Love Story, a lavish Bollywood epic. One of the biggest films to come out of India at the moment, the story is told through Bedi’s character, the complex emperor Shah Jahan, the builder of the fabled palace complex in Agra.

Though clearly busier than ever, Bedi admits that even he has had lean times in the past: “There were some very difficult years in Hollywood, especially because the market for foreign actors there is very thin.” That, however, did not stop him from getting parts in top TV series such as the Bold and the Beautiful.

As befits a true international performer, he works with equal ease in English, Italian and Hindi - and the film set can frequently become a Tower of Babel.

“In Italy, sometimes you would have four different actors speaking four different languages in the same scene because the Italians took the attitude that it was all going to be dubbed in any case. But for us it was hell because you had to be told what the others are saying, remember your cues phonetically and act as though you understood them perfectly.

“But it’s all this that leads to versatility. In Bollywood, for example, even today they can give you your lines on the set. The story is narrated to you and you are given the script scene by scene on the set. So you develop a very quick, retentive memory. It’s a tribute to Bollywood actors that despite working in such haphazard conditions, they still manage to give, in many cases, such credible performances.”

His immediate future plans include taking a few months off to write a book about his family history, “because I think there’s a story to be told there, harking back to where we began”. Perhaps that will also give him time to take stock of an extraordinary career.

“I am very proud of my work in The Far Pavilions, in Taj Mahal, of some of the films I’ve done in Bollywood and even my cameos in the two recent hits Main Hoon Na and Bewafaa. But in terms of my emotional favourites, my title role in the European TV adventure series Sandokan is special for me because all the doors to the West opened for me. I also enjoyed being in Octopussy because it’s a seminal thing to be a villain in a Bond film and to be known by the legion of 007 fans the world over.”

Bedi has just been honoured with the Asian Jewel Award, which is given by the London-based Institute of British Asian Professionals. He can put this alongside the other two lifetime awards on his mantlepiece - one from Bombay’s Advertising Club, the premier industry forum, in recognition of his services to advertising, and one from the Capri Hollywood Festival.

“But I think that if I am to sum it up, what I am proud of is the fact that I have been able to sustain an international career on three continents in film, televison and theatre over three decades and live to tell the tale.”