A character actor par excellence

During a career spanning over five decades, Nedumudi Venu, one of India’s most versatile actors, often liked to talk about his childhood in the villages of Kuttanad in central Kerala, a place of great natural beauty where “even within a radius of 10 to 15 kilometres, one would come to know an umpteen variety of ‘characters’, all with their own quirks and foibles.” Venu would delight audiences by talking about these real-world characters who had so caught his fancy as a young man that whenever he was required to give life to a fictional character in a film “a lot many of those rural folk would queue up in my mind, as if saying ‘why don’t you pick me as your model?’ or ‘how could you choose him when I am here?’ “ It was typical of the man to talk about striking character traits in the people whom he met every day, and surely, in later life, it was his habit as an actor to knock at the doors of directors and fellow actors in the middle of the night in order to discuss the details about the character he was supposed to play in the film. It was a dream come true for Venu when Kavalam invited him to join the experimental theatre troupe he was forming in Thiruvananthapuram in the mid-1970s, which soon attracted all the big names, including the legends in Malayalam cinema and theatre such as the directors Aravindan, Bharathan, Padmarajan, John Abraham, Mohanan, poets such as Ayyappa Paniker and Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, and a variety of actors such as Narendra Prasad, Gopi, John Paul and so on. Venu’s Chellappanasari in the Padmarajan film Thakara, was a role that found him a lot of fame and soon he grew to be an actor who could at once be at ease in parallel cinema as well as popular movies such as Kallan Pavithran, Odaruthammava Aalariyaam, Panchavadippalam, His Highness Abdullah, Bharatham, Chitram, and Tenmavin Kombathu. This oft-repeated concern itself feels like I have got the award many times.” Venu has been extremely reluctant to act in People have described him as the most diplomatic person in Malayalam cinema and he agreed with that view saying that he would deliberately keep himself away from saying or doing things that would hurt anybody or cause them harm.