Who Is Om Puri? Best International Projects By Veteran Indian Actor Who Died At Age 66 After Massive Heart Attack

Veteran Indian actor Om Puri, who also starred in a number of Hollywood projects, passed away at the age of 66 after suffering a heart attack at his residence in Mumbai early Friday, local media reported.

Born in 1950, Puri was one of the stalwarts of the Indian film industry and appeared in a number of mainstream Indian, Pakistani, British as well as Hollywood films. A great actor, he also took on a number of projects from the art and independent cinema sphere.

His work has been acknowledged across the world and he was awarded the OBE (Order of British Empire) in 2004, as well as a number of National awards and the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian award.

The actor’s friends and colleagues reached his suburban Mumbai residence to pay their last respects to the actor and the funeral is scheduled for 6 p.m. local time (4:30 a.m. EST), actor Shabana Azmi wrote on Twitter.

Puri worked with the likes of Patrick Swayze, Tom Hanks and Helen Mirren in his distinguished career. Here are some of his international films:

City of Joy (1992)

An adaptation of a novel written by Dominique Lapierre , the movie revolved around the state of poverty in the then-modern India and also starred “Dirty Dancing” star Patrick Swayze.

The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

A fictionalized version of the story of Tsavo Man-Eaters, the film won an Academy Award for sound editing.

Such a Long Journey (1998)

The film, based on a novel by Rohinton Mistry, was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and was also nominated for 12 categories at Canada’s Genie Awards — including the Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Director.

My Son the Fanatic (1997)

The British film showed Puri playing the lead role of a hardworking taxi driver for which he received the best actor award at the Brussels International Film Festival .

East is East (1999)

Possibly Puri’s most well-known work outside India, the film is a comedy-drama about a mixed-ethnicity household headed by a Pakistani father and an English mother and won a number of awards for the best film, story, screenplay and direction.

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)

The film, where Puri played the role of Zia-ul-haq (former Pakistani president), also starred Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts . It received many nominations, including at the Academy Awards.

The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

The 2014 American comedy-drama showed the competition between two adjacent restaurants in a French town. Written by Steven Knight, the film also starred Helen Mirren, Manish Dayal and Charlotte Le Bon.