Birthday Greetings to the veteran actor and theatre artist Kulbhushan Kharbanda, who turned 73 years today.
Kulbhushan Kharbanda is an actor, who works in Hindi and Punjabi films. He is best known for his role as the antagonist Shakaal in Shaan (1980), inspired by the character Blofeld from James Bond movies. Starting off with the Delhi-based theatre group Yatrik in the 1960s, he then moved to films with Sai Paranjpye’s Jadu Ka Shankh in 1974. He worked in several parallel cinema films before working in the mainstream Hindi film industry. He later appeared in Mahesh Bhatt’s classic Arth (1982), Ek Chadar Maili Si (1986), and in all three parts of Deepa Mehta’s Elements trilogy; Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005).
While Kulbhushan Kharbanda’s fame as a versatile actor earned him a celebrity status in countless Hindi films, still remembered as the villain Shaakal in ‘Shaan’ or the deceptive husband Inder in ‘Arth’, his sensitive, spontaneous and intelligent acting in theatre was well established long before his foray into mainstream and parallel cinema.
After nearly two decades he was seen on the theatre stage at the Padatik Theatre in Kolkata in the production of Atmakatha, directed by Vinay Sharma.
