Veteran Indian actor Nana Patekar, one of the most recognisable faces of Indian cinema, died at the age of 75 in Goa in the early hours of Thursday. According to BBC, he was found unconscious at his home in Goa and admitted to hospital. Dr Shekhar Salkar of Manipal Hospital in Goa told ANI news agency that despite 45 minutes of continuous CPR, he could not be revived, and that Patekar had suffered a cardiac arrest though it was not clear what triggered it. Saudi Gazette reports his family said he died at his residence in Dona Paula, near Panaji, after the cardiac arrest. His funeral was scheduled to take place with full state honours on Thursday evening at his farmhouse in Pune, as announced by the Maharashtra government.

As the obituaries filled with his famous loud roles, The Hindu marked his passing with a list of seven underrated films showing a quieter side of the actor. The Hindu also highlights Diksha, an adaptation of U.R. Ananthamurthy's Ghatashraddha that won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi in 1991, Sai Paranjpye's Disha from 1992, the Oscar Wilde adaptation Abhay from 1994, and Gulzar's final film Hu Tu Tu from 1999.

Before cinema, Patekar built his gritty dialogue delivery in Marathi and Hindi theatre, where Purush and Hamidabai Chi Kothi were among his most famous plays, and he remained active on stage throughout his career. He was also known for blunt, unapologetic criticism of governments, with farmers' issues particularly close to his heart. In 2015 he and actor Makarand Anaspure established the Naam Foundation, which has worked on farmer welfare and water conservation in Maharashtra. His career was not without controversy: BBC reports that in 2018, sexual harassment allegations made by actor Tanushree Dutta over an alleged incident a decade earlier helped spark India's #MeToo movement. Patekar denied the allegations, and in 2019 he was cleared after police said they had not found sufficient evidence against him.

The immediate focus now turns to Pune, where the Maharashtra government confirmed the funeral will be held with full state honours on Thursday evening at Patekar's farmhouse. The scale of the reaction — from the Prime Minister to co-stars and regional film industries, with The Hindu cataloguing tributes from Rajinikanth, Akshay Kumar and Jr NTR among others — suggests his legacy will be formally honoured across Hindi and Marathi cinema in the days ahead. His raspy-voiced dialogues, long quoted in school corridors and tea stalls and imitated by professional comedians, are likely to resurface widely as fans revisit a filmography that spanned gangsters, soldiers, policemen, politicians, patriots, comic characters and tragic figures over nearly five decades.