Roy de Siva with Sumana Amarasinghe in a film
Popular director, actor Roy de Silva who passed away at 80 on June 30 was the last of the Sri Lankan actors who came into cinema by virtue of looks fitting into South Indian star mould.
Most of his contemporaries who reminded us of some South Indian star are either retired or dead. They may be unknown to the new generation of film lovers but they were instrumental in contributing some way to evolve a cinema targeted to entertain the masses.
The long list includes names like Ravindra Rupasena, Prem Jayanth, Herbie Senevirathne, Eddie Junior, Sesha Palihakkara, Herbert M. Senevirathne, Ananda Jayarathne, Baptist Fernando, Senadheera Kuruppu, Asoka Ponnamperuma, Sandhya Kumari and Leena de Silva. The list goes on and on.
Some accuse these actors for exploiting their South Indian matinee idol looks to act but then we have a different breed of stars who do not essentially fit into a native category where looks are concerned. If you look closely, Vijaya Kumaratunga has looks of George Chakiris (star of 633 Squadron and High Bright Sun), Sanath Goonetilleke is our Amitabh Bachchan and Gamini Fonseka our Marlon Brando. Gamini who accused film directors as forcing him to look like South Indian actors was later criticized in the media for copying the Hollywood heartthrob. Film journalists of the 70s were fond of comparing Amarasiri Kalansooriya’s looks to that of French star Jean Paul Belmondo but I hardly see any similarity.
The only actors who had native charm as an added advantage of fitting into the evolving national cinema were Joe Abeywickrema,Tony Ranasinghe, Cyril Wikremage, Douglas Ranasinghe and Ravindra Randeniya while Malini had a chameleon quality of fitting into any genre. She looked like a Bollywood star in Neil Rupasinghe’s 60s potboilers, South Indian in Pilot Premnath and truly native in her characters in Eya Den Loku Lamayek and Nidhanaya.
We applaud when our iconic directors copy (we use the term ‘inspired’) Satyajit Rai, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurusova, and condemn directors like Roy who do the same thing in a different way. The supporting argument of the critics is that the celebrated film makers copy from the works of iconic foreign film makers with the intention of enriching the national cinema.
Roy can be compared to singer H.R.Jothipala who during his lifetime was condemned as polluting the native music culture by copying Hindi tunes but after his death he has become an icon with no singer capable of filling the void left by his death. Roy, like Jothipala, remain as the heartthrobs of the masses, deserving their unique places in history.
Chathurartha Devadithya Gardiyawasam Lindamulage Roy Aloysius Felix de Silva came into film because he looked like South Indian mega star Jaishankar in his young days.
Roy attended an audition for a film at the Kollupitiya Liberty cinema and accidentally bumped into two people who took a close look at him. Roy was about to exit the premises when a peon ran after him telling someone wanted to meet him. When he went back to office he saw the same two people he met him on the staircase.
As he later realized one was South Indian director P. Neelakantan, who was looking for a new face for his next film, and the other was his music director T.R. Papa.
Neelakantan asked Papa in Tamil, “Look at this guy closely. Doesn’t he look like Jaishankar?” Papa readily agreed with him.
Neelakantan selected Roy to play a supporting role in Sujage Rahasa and cast him against some of the biggest stars of the time: Sandhya Kumari, Ravindra Rupasena, Jeevarani and Ananda Jayarathne.
Gamini de Silva, a friend who lives in West Virginia in US remembers Roy working as a sub post master in Hatton when he was acting in his debut. “I met him about 50 years ago and at that time he was acting in Sujage Rahasa with some big Sinhala stars. When I went to his sub post office he used to call me inside and show the stills of his films. In many pictures he was with Sandhya Kumari, the actress who he romanced in the movie. He was ecstatic about his break in Sinhala cinema. I ran into him again somewhere in the late 60s in Moratuwa but didn’t see him after that. He was a very nice person.”
Ranjith Perera of Wattala who played a cameo in Roy’s Sumudu Bhariya remembers the director as very friendly and possessing a rare talent of enlivening any boring gathering with his humour and interesting stories about film stars. “He was a good-hearted man. He was never critical of anybody and enjoyed his niche as an entertainer making films to entertain people. Despite dabbling in commercial cinema he made an award winning film, Thana Giravi, which represented Sri Lanka at the Moscow International Film Festival.”
Thana Giravi starring Douglas Ranasinghe, Henry Jayasena, Upali Aththanayake and Sumana Amarasinghe won praise both at home and abroad, proving that Roys’ talents were underestimated in the film industry. Roy’s first direction venture, Tom Pachaya, an unlikely name for a film, was based on Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest.
Roy often said he made films for the masses. “Poor people have enough tears in their lives and why should we make them cry when they come to the theatre. My goal is to make them laugh, enjoy the film and go back home happily,” he told a TV interview once.
Roy acted in more than 100 films and directed around 40, all of them massive box office hits, while the directors who appealed to the high brow audience and for foreign film festivals, lamented the tough competition from the television when their films failed.
Roy’s best acting was in L.M. Perera’s runaway hit Hathara Peraliya in which he played the character of a village school teacher courting a married woman. The speciality about this film was its dialogues were sung in poems and remains the only work of that nature in Sinhala cinema.
Roy made history in his career spreading over five decades. He directed the first English film in Sri Lanka, “It’s a matter of time.” He was responsible for introducing Sangeetha Weerarathne in that film when she was just 16 years old. She became one of the most celebrated actresses in Sinhala cinema in the 80s and 90s.
One of his most popular films, Sujeewa, made by Joe Dev Anand was released on the same day as Gamini-Malini starrer ‘Edath Sooraya Adath Sooraya’ directed by Lenin Moraes, against all the traditions prevailing in the Sinhala cinema at the time.
No director dared to release a film on the same day as a film starred by these two heartthrobs, for fear of being a box office failure. Gamini warned Roy in advance not to do so but when he conveyed the concerns to Anand he decided to give it a try.
“Against all our initial doubts Sujeewa became a bigger hit than Lenin’s film. It ran only for 50 days while the film starring me and Kanthi Lanka, who was a new comer, ran for more than 150 days,” Roy said in an interview.
When Roy’s Tom Pachaya was released, a film corporation official predicted the movie would not run for more than two weeks, but it ran non-stop for 75 days against all expectations. Roy was described as a ‘lucky star’ for his Midas touch to make every film mint money and he believed the recipe of his success was his ability to understand what the masses craved for.
Roy and Sumana Amarasinghe, his wife of about 50 years, had one of the most successful marriages in the Sinhala tinsel industry. He met Sumana on the sets of ‘Hathara Peraliya’. It was certainly not love at first sight, as he described. “I was surprised at first sight as she preferred to keep a safe distance from me during the entire duration of the film for some reason unknown to me.”
Later, they fell in love and managed to keep their affair a secret for seven long years as Roy believed that the marriage of a popular actor generally decreased popularity among the fans.
Roy who learnt the aspects of film making under Cyril P. Abeyrathne, a very popular film director in the early days of cinema, said he was inspired to act in films by watching Charlie Chaplin films screened at the hostel of his alma mater, Maradana St. Joseph’s College, every Friday.
The funeral of this great artiste was held at Borella Cemetery on July 3 amidst a large gathering of film industry professionals and fans. Roy, the last link of his generation of actors and directors, should be remembered as a product of his times who made movies to entertain people. (newstrails.com)
