Few screen partnerships in Hindi cinema have the lived-in ease of Nana Patekar and Paresh Rawal. They shared frames in Krantiveer (1994), Welcome (2007) and Aanch (2003) and long before that, they shared a stage-struck youth in Mumbai’s Marathi theatre circuit. In an exclusive conversation with Filmfare, Rawal opens up about the Nana few people see: the temper, the tea, the mutton, and the quiet generosity.

“In our youth, we were all into theatre. I had seen him doing a Marathi play at Chhabildas, which was Aala Adanayacha Gaada directed by Arvind Deshpande. We must have been so young, and I watched him with a mixture of awe and envy. Then, of course, one had seen him in plays for Vijayabai, like Hamidabaichi Kothi. He was already a veteran on stage.”

The first meeting“I think the first time I saw him was at Anil Ganguly’s office. He had no artifice. He just walked up to me and said, ‘Tera kaam achha hai Arjun mein.’ Rahul Rawail’s Arjun (1985) had released and I was being praised for it. And guess what he had come to Anil Ganguly’s office for? Only to say no to a film. One of the first films we signed together was Aanch (which released later on in 2003), directed by Rajesh Singh, in which Vyjayanthimala’s son Suchindra Bali made his Hindi debut.”

The temper

“And boy, was he mercurial! I remember him blowing his top on the sets of Ghulam-E-Mustafa (1997). He hated inefficiency and people who aren’t prepared. He would get irritated even on the Welcome sets. He couldn’t handle lack of clarity. He was straightforward and told you like it was, so in that sense he could end up being intimidating. There were no half measures for Nana. He wouldn’t suffer fools gladly, and I’ve seen his temper on sets. Once, after cooking an excellent mutton dish for a producer of his film, he made the producer clean up the vessels. That’s how unpredictable he was.”

“He would often call and ask about my wife and kids: ‘Sampat kaisi hai?’ He mellowed a lot in the last few years. And the social service he did was amazing. He went on about it without any hype, without shouting from the rooftops. He was very happy that, like him, I don’t socialise or party. He had no malice, no agendas. I never saw any vindictiveness in him.”

“I really wanted to write a character of a cool biker with dreadlocks for OMG 2 with him. It would have been a good character. Somehow the script didn’t take shape as I had envisaged, so I opted out of the film. It was later made with a godlike character, which Akshay (Kumar) played.”

Summing up a legend