Nana Patekar never looked like he'd been sent from central casting. The baggy eyes, the growling line readings, the habit of internalising dialogue until it came out as something almost unscripted — he brought Bombay's actual texture into a studio system built on escapism. When Satyajit Ray admired him but couldn't find a suitable project, that gap said everything: Patekar existed between two cinemas, too raw for one, too committed for the other. His early career reads like a masterclass in controlled menace. As Baba Golub in Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay! — the brutal pimp presiding over a child army — he delivered the kind of performance that doesn't announce itself as acting. As Anna in Parinda, Vidhu Vinod Chopra's On the Waterfront transposed to Mumbai's underworld, he won two supporting actor awards and proved the range was real. He and Irrfan Khan remain the only performers to have swept Filmfare's best actor, best supporting actor, and best villain prizes — a triathlon that the industry's template system almost makes impossible. The personal and the professional were never cleanly separated. He underwent three years of army training for Prahaar (1991), a film he also directed, and was appointed an honorary captain in the Indian territorial army. When the Kargil war broke out in 1999, he enlisted with the Maratha Light Infantry for 60 days, earning a promotion to major. When his brother was killed in the 1993 Bombay bus bombings — his wife had also been due to board one of the targeted vehicles — his refusal ever to work with Sanjay Dutt, who was linked to the attacks, was not a career calculation. It was categorical. Krantiveer (1994) is the performance that crystallised what he could do with commercial material. Playing a dissolute gambler who finds purpose through social activism, Patekar shot his final scenes with a doctor on standby due to heart problems, yet the film became one of the year's biggest Hindi hits. There's something fitting about that: a body under strain producing the work that connected most broadly. The industry that had seen him as a commercial risk had to revise the assessment. Then came the #MeToo reckoning, and the two threads of Patekar's story — the artist and the man — stopped being separable. Tanushree Dutta had first accused him of sexual harassment and intimidation in 2008, claims she repeated in 2018. Footage aired on Indian TV showed a mob surrounding her car, the windscreen smashed, the tyres flattened. Patekar denied everything. No formal charges were brought. The Mumbai police opened an investigation. The incident became a marker for how Bollywood handled — or refused to handle — the treatment of women on set. The comeback attempts that followed were uneven. Supporting turns in the propagandistic The Vaccine War (2023) and the limp Housefull 5 (2025) suggested an industry uncertain what to do with him. The exception was Vishal Bhardwaj's O'Romeo (2026), where he apparently found a director willing to use what was actually there. His Natsamrat (2016) — playing an acclaimed actor unravelling in retirement — had already shown that he could fold his own difficult late-career status into a role with uncanny precision. He died on 8 October 2026, aged 75. He is survived by his wife Neelakanti and son Malhar; their first son, Durvasa, died in 1980 aged two. The Naam Foundation he co-founded in 2015 continues working with drought-affected farmers. What remains is a body of work that the Indian film industry will spend years figuring out how to contextualise — and a set of accusations it never adequately resolved.
