By Matters India Reporter
Mumbai: Tom Alter, son of a Protestant missionary couple and a renowned Bollywood actor, died on September 29 in Mumbai after battling stage four skin cancer. The third-generation American in India was 67.
“It is with sadness we announce the death of Tom Alter, actor, writer, director, Padma Shri, and our dear husband and father,” a statement released on behalf of his family said. “Tom passed away Friday night (September 29) at home with his family and close family members in attendance. We ask for their privacy to be respected at this time.”
Alter, who won Padma Shri, India’s fourth civilian award, acted in more than 300 films and appeared in numerous TV shows. The Indian government awarded him in recognition for his services to the fields of arts and cinema.
The one-time sports writer and author was the first person to interview Sachin Tendulkar for TV when the cricketer was yet to debut for India. Alter has written three books, one non-fiction and two fictions.
Alter was born in 1950 at Mussoorie, a hill station in Uttarakhand state.
Alter is the son of American Christian missionaries of English and Scottish ancestry and has lived for years in Mumbai and the Himalayan hill station of Landour. His grandparents migrated to India from Ohio, United States in 1916, when they arrived in Madras (now Chennai). From there, they went to Lahore where they settled. His father was born in Sialkot, now in Pakistan.
After the Partition of India, his family too split into two; his grandparents remained in Pakistan while his parents moved to India. After living in Allahabad, Jabalpur and Saharanpur, they finally settled in Rajpur, Uttar Pradesh, a small town located between Dehradun and Mussoorie (now Uttarakhand) in 1954. His elder sister, Martha Chen, has a doctorate in South Asian Studies from University of Pennsylvania and teaches at Harvard University. His brother John is a poet and a teacher.
As a child, Alter studied Hindi among other subjects in Mussoorie, consequently, he has occasionally been referred to as the “Blue-eyed saheb with impeccable Hindi.”
He was educated in Mussoorie’s Woodstock School. His father taught history and English at the Christian college (E.C.C), Allahabad, and thereafter taught at a seminary in Saharanpur. In 1954, his parents started an ashram in Rajpur, called “Massihi Dhyaan Kendra” (Messiah meditation center) and they settled there. People of all religions came there for studies and discussions. They would initially recite biblical studies in Urdu and subsequently in Hindi.
At 18, Alter left for the US for higher education but returned after a year. He was enamored with Bollywood after watching Aradhana (worship)a romantic film in Hindi. He studied acting at Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, under Roshan Taneja during 1972-1974.
Alter acknowledged, in a 2009 interview, that he had dreamt of being Rajesh Khanna the hero of Aradhana. “I was a teacher until the day I watched Rajesh Khanna romance Sharmila in Aradhana. That was the beginning of my addiction to the cinema.”
Alter’s first release was Ramanand Sagar’s Charas in 1976, in which he played the role of superstar Dharmendra’s boss, a CID official. He also acted in Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977), Shyam Benega’s Junoon (1979), Manoj Kumar’s Kranti (1981) and Raj Kapoor’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985).
He married Carol Evans in 1977. They have two children together: son Jamie and daughter Afshaan. Jamie, a cricket writer, is currently the sports editor of The Times of India.