Jayasree Kabir obituary

"Keya briefly lifts the protagonist's head (what is the point of seeing the darker side of everything?) and offers him renewed reason to persist, even as he's finally driven into exile. Her beguiling stillness contrasts with her swain's restless agitation: as Kabir later told the writer Bulbul Hasan, Ray expected precision, but he also made you feel that the camera would capture exactly what you offered nothing more, nothing less."

"Launched while still a teenager in Ray's 1970 film Pratidwandi (The Adversary), Kabir compiled a modest yet highly selective list of credits, including several key titles of Bangladeshi cinema, before making her final screen appearance in a 2004 episode of the BBC's primetime ratings winner New Tricks, starring Bolam."

"Emerging in the same year as Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, to which it suggested an eastern equivalent, the drama pounded the city's neon-lit streets in the company of Dhritiman Chatterjee's Siddhartha, a disillusioned college dropout on a punishing quest for gainful employment and satisfaction besides."

"Few performers' careers have encompassed both discovery by Satyajit Ray and working opposite sometime Likely Lad James Bolam. Yet this was the distinction the actor Jayasree Kabir, who has died aged 73, achieved while shifting between the southern and northern hemispheres as work and family commitments required."

Jayasree Kabir died aged 73 after a career that began when Satyajit Ray cast her as a teenager in his 1970 film Pratidwandi (The Adversary). She played Keya, a quiet, beguiling presence whose stillness counterpoints the protagonist's agitation. Kabir compiled a modest but selective list of credits that included several important Bangladeshi films and oscillated between southern and northern hemispheres for work and family. Pratidwandi, adapted from a Sunil Ganguly novel, served as the first film in Ray's Calcutta trilogy and showed New Wave influences. Kabir's final screen role was a 2004 episode of New Tricks opposite James Bolam.

Read at www.theguardian.com