Alyque Padamsee

Alyque Padamsee (5 March 1928 – 17 November 2018) was an Indian theatre personality and ad film maker. He played Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the 1982 British period film Gandhi. Besides being involved in Indian theatre as an actor and producer, Padamsee was an advertising professional who once headed the advertising company Lintas Bombay. Early life and education Padamsee was born in Bombay in 1928 into a traditional Khoja Muslim Ismaili family hailing from the Kutch region of Gujarat. Ancestors of Padamsee family originally belonged to the Charan community of Kutch who converted to Islam and joined Khoja caste. The name Padamsee derives from the Sanskrit Padmasinh (padma=lotus, sinh=lion, usually a title). The family had been settled in the nearby Kathiawar region for some generations; Padamsee's grandfather, who had been the sarpanch (headman) of Vāghnagar, a village in Bhavnagar district, was famous for having distributed his entire granary to the village during a famine. Padamsee's father, Jafferseth Padamsee, was an affluent businessman who owned 10 buildings and also ran a glassware and furniture business. His mother, Kulsumbai Padamsee, was a home-maker. She was Jaffer Padamsee's second wife; they had eight children. Her eldest son was Sultan Padamsee, also known as Bobby, a theatre actor who was reputedly gay and died by suicide at the age of twenty-three. Alyque was born after three girls; one of his older sisters, Zarina, was the wife of Hamid Sayani, brother of Ameen Sayani. Another of his sisters was Roshan Alkazi, wife of Ebrahim Alkazi. One of Padamsee's (distant) cousins is the painter Akbar Padamsee, son of Hasanali Padamsee. Although rich, this trading family was not well-educated, and neither of his parents had finished school. Alyque and his brothers (but not his sisters) were the first in the family to attend school and learn English there; the parents later picked up a smattering of the language from their sons. Raised in an extremely traditional environment, in a devout Muslim family, Padamsee described himself as an agnostic who disclaimed all religion by the age of 18. He was educated at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai.