Douglas Ranasinghe: the actor of quiet dignity

Salam hangat buat Sobat semua !, saya slalu berdo'a smoga Sobat semua akan slalu bahagia dan sehat slamanya. Berikut ini kita akan membicarakan tentang Douglas Ranasinghe: the actor of quiet dignity."

For most of us, actors are what really matter in films. We try to identify what kind of stories they are most suited for. This is where some actors are remembered for one or two roles, which pale the rest of their careers into insignificance. We are disappointed whenever they fail to reach the standards set by those few landmark performances, and judge them a little too harshly. Maybe this is why certain actors, who keep an interest in their �trade� no matter what film they are cast in, remain alive in our memory.

I encountered Douglas Ranasinghe for the first time in my childhood. I wasn�t a film buff back then, and television became the way through which I got to know him. I remember a dignified face: a figure for all to see and to revere. That face hasn�t left him. Not yet. It�s still there. And if the recent past is anything to get by, I�m sure that it�s going to stay there for quite some time. I�m also sure it has established him as perhaps the most quietly dignified actor in our film industry. This maybe a crass observation on my part, but I believe that it�s true. In any case, he remains alive in our collective memory. No mean feat, that.

He was born in Kurunegala and was initially educated at his village. Apparently it had been a custom in his family to send the children to a Sinhala mixed school. He tells me that back then, there wasn�t anything called Grade I: �From Montessori, which was called the �Hodiya Panthiya�, you went on for about four years until middle school.�

Afterwards, he had been sent to St. Anne�s College. �It was a missionary school back then as well, but unlike now it took in quite a number of non-Christians. Wijeratne Warakagoda, who later went to Ananda, was there also. We had a robust culture in our school then.� He adds that with the onslaught of Free Education, missionary schools began admitting only students from their faith, and hence quality went down a little.

Typical for his age, young Ranasinghe had taken part in sports activities, which he says influenced his first love. �Almost every boy who took part in sports wanted to join the Army or any of the Defence Forces.� Ranasinghe had been a prefect at his school as well, which probably shaped his desire to enter the police force. He applied for the post of sub-inspector twice, but owing to his weight he was turned down on both occasions. Happily for him, however, he was called in the third time he posted an application, and was taken in for a training course at Kalutara. In the meantime, he left school and decided to join Law College, a career as a lawyer being his second love.

So where did acting figure in all this? The training course, through fate perhaps, was postponed for three months, and Ranasinghe got to meet Sathischandra Edirisinghe. �That�s how I got my first role,� he tells me. Apparently Edirisinghe had done him a favour around that time; he now wanted Ranasinghe to take the part of the Corporal in Henry Jayasena�s Hunuwataye Kathawa. �That was how I could return the favour!� he remembers, laughing, �I was more than happy to do it. Edirisinghe asked me to take the script to Henry aiya, who then accepted me.�

That not only became the first of many plays he would take part in; it also opened for him a pathway into films. After Hunuwataye Kathawahad been staged to great acclaim, Lester James Peries had come around and asked after Ranasinghe from Jayasena, who had jokingly said �Lester, you�re stealing all my good actors�. According to Ranasinghe, this was a prophetic utterance, because it meant that Lester wanted him for an upcoming film. Ranasinghe was then asked to meet Peries who, upon their first meeting, then told him about the film, Akkara Paha. He was of course taken to act in it, though it would be released a year after he acted in another film, G. D. L. Perera�s Romeo Juliet Kathawak.

Akkara Paha was an eye-opener for Ranasinghe. I remember Philip Cooray writing how Ranasinghe dominated the first half of the story as Samarasena, the hard-bitten friend to the film�s main character Sena. This perhaps would have been due to how Milton Jayawardena underplayed his role as Sena, to the point where �Samare� appears to be dominating and guiding his every act and move. �Even Dr. Peries once said that he had great difficulty in saving his hero, his protagonist, from me!�

Talking about Peries, Ranasinghe tells me that he is a shrewd director who knows how an actor should do his job. �I began to understand how strenuous working in films was with Akkara Paha,� he says, ��Maestro� (meaning Peries) isn�t authoritarian. But he is very specific in what he expects of you. I remember doing three rehearsals � one for him, one for the camera, and one for the lights. Afterwards, he would ask me to do the final take.

�That is why you can�t play the fool around him; you have to be very careful with him as your director. You must not only perform well in those three rehearsals; you must also remember what you did in them, so that you can act well with the final take. He remembers nearly every detail of what you did very clearly. Nothing escapes his eye.� He tells me that when it came to films, Peries� guidance helped him to master the mechanics of acting.

Meanwhile, he cut his stint at Law College, having decided to leave for England and study about the cinema at the London School of Filmmaking. His interest in the theatre hadn�t gone off one bit, and he remembers acting in two of the finest plays to come out around this time. The first was Henry Jayasena�s Apata Puthe Magak Nathe, which had proved controversial and was banned for some time. The second was Sathischandra Edirisinghe�s Hotabari Yuddhe, a translation of George Orwell�s Animal Farm. But his lifelong affair with the cinema, which continues to this day, would dominate his career to come.

Ranasinghe hasn�t had a prolific career in films in terms of quantity, admittedly. But he has taken part in several landmarks and critical successes, including Yuganthaya and Viragaya.

I remember a friend of mine telling me that every actor, no matter how good or bad he is, has a guiding principle. I ask Ranasinghe whether he had such a principle throughout his career. He replies cautiously to this, indicating that he never embraced one set of acting �principles� to the exclusion of another. In other words, he tells me, he always looked for better methods, better ways, by which he could improve and be genuine with the characters he was depicting.

He admits however that at one point, back when he was performing in Apata Puthe Magak Nathe, he began to read up on Stanislavski�s �Method�, a style of acting which demanded the actor to identify closely and be linked up with the character he was playing. He adds however that as time went by he dropped off the idea of becoming a Method actor, implying that he became a firm individualist when it came to how he should act in a film.

I then ask him whether the type of characters he got during his time were any different to those we are used to seeing on TV and in films today. He admits that back then, at a time when our cinema was becoming more indigenous, a new type of character was being popularised in our films. He calls these characters �parajithayo� or �the defeated�, and explains who they were.

�These were people who lost out in their life, who were always thwarted in what they wanted, usually though not always in love. There are so many examples of them, to be found in both commercial and serious films in my time. Sugath from Golu Hadawatha is a �parajithaya�. So is Samarasena from Akkara Paha.� He implies that the films made during that time enforced the message that �the defeated are the heroes�, indicating that this was how films like Golu Hadawatha became box-office hits.

He also observes, however, that times have changed, and that at present such characters don�t ensure success for a film. I agree. Today, it�s all about love stories and broken romances, and if not these then big-screen epics in the mould of religious propaganda. Ranasinghe remarks that while commercial films reflect how consumerised our society is, the non-commercial cinema here has taken to another trend, a more controversial one. He cautions that directors in this cinema should be more responsible when it comes to what they depict in their films. Freedom, he observes correctly, must go with responsibility.

Douglas Ranasinghe has seen the better part of his career in supporting roles. But it is a measure of how quietly dignified he is that even in them, he exudes a humility and charm which at once dominates the mood of the film. Perhaps this is his greatest strength, which happily continues. This will continue wherever he will be, hopefully. And I�m sure it will.

Written for: Ceylon Today ESCAPE, November 28 2014

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Source : http://fragmenteyes.blogspot.com/2014/12/douglas-ranasinghe-actor-of-quiet.html

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