Like a meteor do the name and fame of Tony
Ranasinghe arise in the annals of our film history. An actor with a vast career
behind his years, he is also a thespian, Shakespeare translator, and
scriptwriter. At a time when dance-driven, music-ridden stage plays and films
ruled the day, Ranasinghe was part of a movement that sought to free both from
the artifice to which they had grown accustomed.
Conversing with him during the leisurely
hours of a Monday morning, it felt as though I were reliving his past, as he
recounted it to me, frame by frame. At the end of his reminiscences, not only am I convinced that he is among
our artistic world’s biggest anchors, but also among its most eclectic and
widely read. Hours turn to minutes, minutes to seconds, as we go back in time.
The task of a painter is made all the more difficult by the image he seeks to
depict. The same goes for the task of a “pen-painter”, who seeks to draw up an
intimate portrait of the man he is interviewing. I can only hope that what I
pen down here shall not be considered irrelevant.
His memories begin in 1937,
when he was born. Raised in Modara, Ranasinghe studied there as well. His
education, which lasted only until the G.C.E. Ordinary Level, was done partly at
De La Salle College, partly at St. Anne’s College, Wattala. It was a time when,
after the terrors of a World War and the chaos of independence, people were
beginning their search for a solid cultural identity of their own. The moorings
of their cultural backdrop, in film and on stage, largely were with
song-and-dance driven melodrama, and a folk-tradition in the theatre was
up-and-coming. It was in this atmosphere that Ranasinghe began working at the Government
Electrical Department, which he joined in 1957. That was the year in which
Lester James Peries had gone to Cannes, with his debut feature, Rekava,
sending ripples across our cultural firmament. For Ranasinghe, no time could
have been riper for his career to come.
His acting career commenced
in 1962. He became part of a stage group that was seeking an even more austere,
realistic form of drama for Sri Lanka. Led by Sugathapala de Silva, the group,
“Apé Kattiya”, produced down-to-earth, kitchen-sink realistic plays, which were
largely dialogue-driven. Boarding Karayo was Ranasinghe’s debut. Then came
1964. Lester James Peries was making Gamperaliya. Three roles were to be
filled by three actors from “Apé Kattiya”. Ranasinghe played one of them, the
village lad Baladasa, whose character is more extensively depicted in Martin
Wickramasinghe’s novel, but which was, as with the other two, pruned down for
its screen adaptation. All three actors – G. W. Surendra, Wickrema Bogoda, and
himself – would go onto commendable film careers of their own in the years to
come.
From then on, it was a climb
up the summit for all three, and for Ranasinghe it would be the biggest climb
of them all. With Lester James Peries alone, he made several films within the
next decade or so. “As an actor, I did not seek to dedicate my abilities solely
to serious, un-commercial films,” he says. But in his share of such serious
movies, the roles he played would all, at this stage, centre on contemplative,
inward-looking characters. This was true of Delovak Athara (1966), which
launched him to immediate fame, so much so that one Indian critic had this to
write of his performance in it: “[it] makes one shudder in retrospect at our
local breed of tear-shedding, song-singing, namby-pamby leading love boys”. No
doubt about it, Ranasinghe had carved a niche for himself. His fragile-looking,
inverted personality distinguished him from the defiant rebelliousness typified
by Gamini Fonseka.
Having worked with different
directors with different temperaments, Tony Ranasinghe describes Peries as a
filmmaker who was “always very particular in what he wanted of the actor, and
never authoritarian”, and Sumitra Peries as “giving more leeway to the
individual actor”. Having worked as both actor and scriptwriter (his first
screenplay, for 1986’s Koti Valigaya, was acclaimed), he is also no
dogmatist. On the future of our acting industry, he warns against the alarming
tendency towards improvisation, a technique that he feels should be used only very
rarely.
He is also not against a
commercial film climate either, although he would like to see a robust one,
wholly different from what the present here offers. “We need a solid
infrastructure of good commercial films,” he tells me very seriously. What he
counts above all for an actor, it would seem, is his fidelity to life and to
himself. “I was once offered the leading role in a remake of a Tamil film,” he
says, “and was asked by the director to act like Sivaji Ganesan, then the
heartthrob of South Indian cinema. Very politely, I told him that I could not
act anyone other than myself, least of all Ganesan. Well, two other actors were
then taken to replace me and my co-star, and the film, when released later,
became a flop”. An act of faith, it seems, which vindicated his belief that the
truest model an actor can find is in himself.
Also top among his
priorities is his suspicion over fads in acting. Not that he is an
arch-conservative when it comes to acting technique. But he is equally not all
too embracive of current trends either. This explains his attitude to Marlon
Brando, hailed today as having brought a remarkable level of realism to the
acting profession in his day, criticised by Ranasinghe because of his inability
to play “anyone beyond himself” at a certain stage in his career. Looking at
Brando’s performances in retrospect, this view seems quite justifiable. Brando
was a purveyor of “The Method”, an acting style which required its members to
immerse themselves fully in the roles they were playing. Daniel Day-Lewis, who has
won three Best Actor Oscars, is the most faithful exponent of this method in
our time.
What Ranasinghe warns
against is not the Method per se, but against being drawn to its
superficialities without grasping its roots (which is the fault, he remarks, of
many young actors today). This explains his admiration for Shakespearean actors
of yore – Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, and Kenneth Branagh.
“Olivier made Henry V back in 1944, while Branagh filmed it again in
1989. Both were top-notch,” he says. These were actors able to take on a
wide-encompassing array of roles, without being limited to one in particular.
Indeed, a deeply rooted distaste for typecasting with an
admiration for actors who were wide in their range of performances seems to make
up Ranasinghe’s outlook on acting.
This is not to say that he
is against actors being associated with one particular image – something,
incidentally, which can be said of several of his performances as well – but it
is equally true that he is not a fan of extreme typecasting, where the actor is
pushed into a certain, narrow image he has built for himself. It is significant
that the American actors he quotes as being those he cherished the most in his day
– Gregory Peck, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart – were, while having built a
lasting image of themselves in their own peculiar way, never pegged to one
particular type of role. I think this can equally and validly be said of
Ranasinghe’s career too.
Perhaps, at a time when
specialisation has become the order of the day, the lack of this breed is
inevitable. It is this fact of it being inevitable that makes everything all
the more saddening. Tony Ranasinghe is one of the last vestiges of a passing
order, which may have prevailed, had our minds, instead of being allured by
current fads, been set on it. This is what was not inevitable, and it is the
fact of it not being inevitable that makes everything all the more depressing.
Written for: Ceylon Today LATITUDE, June 22 2014
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