Guru Dutt

This biography traces the life and works of a remarkable director and actor. During his brief thirteen year career, Guru Dutt replaced the repetitive ingredients of formulaic Hindi cinema with an individual and lyrical vision, playing his screen characters with a sensitivity and compassion that endowed them with a rare depth. The enigmatic, romantic, often tragic undertones of his screen personae became closely associated with his own persona off-screen. Guru Dutt's doomed heroes seemed to tell his own story, from his middle-class origins to his dramatic film career and eventual suicide at thirty-nine. Nasreem Munni Kabir traces the life of this unusual man through accounts of his films and a series of interviews with his family, colleagues, and friends. Several years of painstaking research and conversations with Guru Dutt's associates have yielded a complete and compelling account of this legendary artist.