Veteran Tamil comedian Nagesh dies

B D Narayankar

YESTERYEARS Tamil film actor and comedian Cyril K Nagesh died here on Saturday afternoon. He was 77.

Nagesh was suffering from diabetes and a heart ailment.

He is one of the few actors who starred with filmstars of yesteryears MGR, Sivaji Ganesan, Gemini Ganesan and contemporary artists, including Kamalhassan and Rajnikanth.

Nagesh also acted in Hindi films - Farz starring Jeetendra and Babita in 1967 and Jewel Thief starring Dev Anand and Vyjayantimala.

Born as Gunddu Rao in a Brahmin community, Nagesh was born to Kannada-speaking Brahmin Madhwa parents. He walked out of his house telling his parents that he would be back only after establishing himself in some career.

In Chennai, he stayed in a one-room bed-sit at West Mambalam (then a remote area) with lyricist Vaali and veteran actor Srikanth. He found a small-time job in the Railways, but he was not satisfied.

One day, he saw a Tamil play '''Kambar Ramayanam' enacted by his colleagues, and felt he could do a good job. He persuaded the secretary of the Railways cultural association to give him the role of a man suffering from stomach pain.

MGR, then chief guest, seeing this play, in his speech praised Nagesh for his performance. From then onwards, Nagesh played small roles in various drama troupes and kept himself busy.

It was producer Balaji who spotted him and gave him his first break in films. The most memorable performance of Nagesh out of the 1000 odd films he has acted in, is his role in Thiruvilayaadal in which he speaks a soliloquy that is one of the most memorable scenes in the film. In this movie, he played a poet who had fallen into bad times. When Sivaji who played Siva in the film saw it he asked the director to retain it in full without a cut.

Kamal Hassan used to say that he was very jealous of Nagesh. Apparently when Kamal Hassan used to work with Balachander, at instances when he found it difficult to bring the emotions in front of the screen, KB used to say "had this scene been done by Nagesh, he would have done this in the first shot". This lets us know what a great actor Nagesh was.

On the personal front Nagesh was one of the few comedians to have acted with both MGR and Sivaji and he has prudently invested his money in real estate. Later on, he had a fallout with MGR and it led to his removal from many films. He became an alcoholic and began to slide down in his career. Nagesh theatre owned by him in Chennai was on the verge of getting seized for non-payment of dues but he met MGR and was bailed out.

Though financially he was saved, his career had become a thing of the past and he then moved on to character roles after getting himself cured of alcoholism. He has had to face many sorrows in his personal life the greatest tragedy being when he drove down to see his mother in his new imported car stacked with money and found his mother's last rites being performed on the banks of Amravathi.

His son Anand Babu known for his dancing prowess made an impressive start as a hero but soon lost out and is now said to be hitting the bottle. For having married a Christian, Nagesh was kept out of his family.