Bollywood Actor Pran(Feb 12,1920 -July 12,2013) Dies

Bollywood actor Pran(93)passed away on July 12,2013 Friday night at Lilavati Hospital,Mumbai

Pran who acted in more than 300 films in a 5-decade career, was recently honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in May 2013

Also he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India’s third highest civilian award in 2001

Pran's performance has been memorable particularly in two films penned by Salim-Javed in the 1970s — as Sher Khan, an outlaw with the proverbial heart of gold, opposite Amitabh Bachchan in Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeer (1973) and as ‘Michael D’ Souza’ in Majboor (again as Amitabh Bachchan’s providential saviour)

Born Pran Kishan Sikand into a Punjabi family in Delhi, Pran was credited with enhancing the importance of the villain in Bollywood at a time when the bad guy was very much one-dimensional.Pran worked in a number of films before partition. But his real break came when his friend and legendary Pakistani author Saadat Hasan Manto helped him get a villain’s role in Shaheed Latif’s Ziddi (1948).

Throughout the 1950s, he solidified his reign as Bollywood’s leading villain, culminating in Bimal Roy’s 1958 ‘gothic’ classic Madhumati, which had Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala in the lead. 

Pran effortlessly pulled off this coldly efficient menace throughout the 1960s in mega box-office favourites such as Ram Aur Shyam (1967), Half-Ticket (1962) and in Johnny Mera Naam as Dev Anand’s long-separated brother (1970)

According to his family members, his last rites will be performed on Saturday noon at Shivaji Park in Dadar