Pathanamthitta

Palappurathu Keshavan Surendranatha Thilakan was born on 15 July 1935, in the Pathanamthitta country of central Travancore, and grew up at Ayiroor — the village with which he is identified and where the family settled. He was the second of six children of P. T. S. Keshavan and Devayani Amma. His father worked for a time as an estate supervisor at Mundakayam, and it was there, among friends, that the young Thilakan first formed a drama troupe.

His education was scattered across several institutions — Asan Pallikoodam at Manikkal, St Louis Catholic School at Nalamvayal, M. T. Seminary School in Kottayam, and finally Sree Narayana College in Kollam. He served briefly in the military before deciding, in 1956, to leave college and act full-time. It was a reckless choice in the Kerala of that decade, and it took him more than fifteen years to reach a film set.

Twenty Years on the Stage

Thilakan's foundation was theatre, and this is the single most important fact about him as a performer. He founded the Mundakayam Nataka Samithi with friends, then worked with the Kerala People's Arts Club — the KPAC, the communist-aligned troupe that transformed Malayalam theatre — until 1966. He went on to Kalidasa Kalakendram, Changanacherry Geetha, and the company of P. J. Antony. He performed in radio plays for All India Radio.

Two decades of nightly performance in village halls and temple grounds produced an actor with total control of voice and timing, and — more unusually — an actor who understood the difference between a stage and a camera and adjusted accordingly. When Malayalam cinema turned towards realism in the 1980s, Thilakan was already equipped for it.

His film debut came in Periyar, directed by P. J. Antony, in the early 1970s. Small roles followed in Gandharvakshetram and Ulkadal. His first substantial lead was as Kallu Varkey, a drunkard, in Kolangal in 1981.

The 1980s made him. He won his first Kerala State Film Award in 1982 for Yavanika, and another for Yathra. In 1987 he won the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for Rithubhedam. He received Special Jury Mentions at the National Awards three further times — for Perumthachan in 1990, Eakantham in 2006, and Ustad Hotel in 2012. He holds the record for the Kerala State Film Award for Second Best Actor, winning it in 1981, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1999, and won Best Actor in 1990 and 1994.

The Fathers

Thilakan became the definitive screen father of Malayalam cinema — not the benign patriarch, but the difficult, disappointed, sometimes cruel one. In Kireedam in 1989 he played Achuthan Nair, a constable watching his son's life destroyed and unable to intervene; his performance, built almost entirely on withheld reaction, is regarded as among the finest in Indian cinema. He was Chacko Master in Spadikam in 1995, a martinet schoolteacher whose severity ruins his son. He appeared opposite Mohanlal in Chenkol, Narasimham and Evidam Swargamanu, and opposite Mammootty in Thaniyavarthanam, Mrugaya and Mathilukal.

He worked with successive generations of leading men — Jayaram, Dileep, Kunchacko Boban, Prithviraj — and appeared in over two hundred films. He was an atheist and a communist sympathiser all his life, and had long associations with troupes that carried that politics.

Conflict

Thilakan's last years were marked by a bitter and public dispute with the Malayalam film industry's organisations. In February 2010 he was dropped from a film at the instance of the Film Employees Federation of Kerala, reportedly because he had worked with a director aligned to a rival association. He protested publicly. The Association of Malayalam Movie Artists, of which he was a member, responded by issuing him a show-cause notice for taking the matter into the public domain.

He criticised both bodies openly, and the affair escalated into an effective informal ban. He was replaced on another film after the federation threatened a boycott. Support came from the trade union wing of the Communist Party of India, and he and his supporters staged a march at a shooting location in Alappuzha. He also alleged that political lobbying had cost him a National Award for Best Actor in the early 1990s.

The episode was, for many in Kerala, a case of an old and difficult man being punished for saying out loud what everyone knew about how the industry was run.

End

He had two families: with the actress Santha, three sons — Shaji, Shammi and Shobi, the latter two both actors — and with the artist Sarojam, a son and two daughters. A grandson has since entered films.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009, the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award for the South in 2006, a Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Fellowship in 2007 and the Bharath Gopi Award in 2010.

Suffering from diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, he collapsed on set on 1 August 2012 during the shooting of a film. He was hospitalised at Thrissur and then Thiruvananthapuram, suffered two heart attacks, developed pneumonia and was placed on a ventilator. He died on 24 September 2012, aged seventy-seven, and was cremated with full state honours. His final released performance, in Ustad Hotel, brought a National Award jury mention that year — a working actor to the last frame.