Tony Ranasinghe ,in full flow

By Uditha Devapriya

This is the first in a series of candid vignettes about Tony Ranasinghe, one of the most complex actors we ever had. It is based on an interview the writer did with him in 2014.Marlon Brando strode the theatre like the colossus that he was, changing the face of acting in a way none of his predecessors had. Yet, even after the shock of seeing him in A Streetcar Named Desire, nothing quite prepared people for his role as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. For me, this is the ultimate Brando performance; it is so, simply because, in a cast filled with the most distinguished thespians of the day – from John Gielgud to James Mason – Brando stands apart, the obvious exception, the odd man out, the black sheep. When Antony weeps over Caesar’s body, he doesn’t wax eloquent, he mumbles.

The performance startled audiences, shocked others, and scandalised a few. In Sri Lanka, a new generation of actors had begun to crop up – they had left school and had moved to Colombo, in search of employment – and they came across Brando. Most of them took to him, entranced by his interpretation of a character which had, for so long, been deemed sacrosanct by thespians, and stage directors. “When you see Gielgud and Mason, and Brando enters the story, things never seem the same,” Cyril Wickramage told me. “I can’t think of another actor who so enthralled me,” Ravindra Randeniya, who went on to play Stanley in Dhamma Jagoda’s adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, recalled.

There’s probably no better and more fitting symbol of Brando’s influence on acting in Sri Lanka than Gamini Fonseka. The carelessness, the disregard for the other characters, the sleek agility, and the tendency to project himself, rather than the character he is playing – these are hallmarks of a Brando performance, and they are there in Fonseka’s performances, too. “I chose him because he was the ideal fit for Simon Kabilana,” Lester Peries told me, talking about Yuganthaya. I saw his point: at that point, Fonseka was the only man in the country who could play Kabilana. He had progressed from the naivete of his early years – captured by Peries himself, in Gamperaliya – into a kind of supreme self-confidence, which Brando had, by that time, epitomised. To see Fonseka was to savour him.

When I met him, in 2014, Tony Ranasinghe was not doing well. He did not want to meet me at first: he was doubtful about whether we’d have a fruitful conversation. Having read one gossipy piece after another in the papers, I couldn’t blame him. And yet, I wanted to have a serious conversation with him, about what he thought of his profession. After drinking his medicine, he rambled on and on. I sensed that he preferred me gone. Just three years out of school, with no aim in life other than meeting those who had contributed to our cultural landscapes, I was probably an outsider in his eyes. But, as the minutes wore on, he began to relax. Something in him softened. We began to have that serious conversation.

Much to my surprise, Ranasinghe did not think highly of Brando. He preferred to talk about Shakespeare – he had translated Shakespeare to Sinhala, one of the first in his time to do so – and about Kurosawa’s Ran, which he rated as among the finest adaptations of his plays. Perhaps, inevitably, we got around to Brando’s Mark Antony. The lines under Ranasinghe’s eyes darkened somewhat. “That is not a performance I rate highly,” he told me. I thought of telling him how eloquently Cyril Wickramage had waxed on it, but soon thought otherwise. I was, after all, sitting in front of one of Sri Lanka’s finest actors, and if he didn’t like Brando’s acting, who was I to disagree? “He doesn’t act, he mumbles, contrary to how a Shakespeare performance should be played out,” he told me.

He then moved on to Brando’s later work. “Five or so years after Julius Caesar, he took part in a film called The Ugly American. To me, that signified Brando’s failures as an actor.” The Ugly American is not one of Brando’s finest performances – the acting is jittery. Yet, to take such a role, and ignore his other credits – such as the widowed husband in Last Tango in Paris or the Don in The Godfather, seemed unfair. “In his later years, he unbuckled himself so badly that he lost all sense of discipline.” He was referring to Brando’s lesser years – his unjustifiably expensive cameo in Superman, and his even more unjustifiably unfocused role in The Island of Dr Moreau. But what of the interregnum, his great years? To Ranasinghe, these seemed dispensable, quirks in a jittery career. In a big way his attitude reflected his own notions of acting, which stemmed from his career and work.

Not unlike most of his contemporaries, Tony Ranasinghe came from a theatrical tradition. At De La Salle College, in Modera, he had involved himself in literary activities. At S. Thomas’, Gamini Fonseka had done the same. But for Ranasinghe, these activities instilled in him a love for the literary and the dramatic. The rift between theatre and cinema, particularly in acting, is too discernible to ignore. In that sense Ranasinghe emerged as a counterpoint to Fonseka. Ever respectful of the stage, he never quite left it. In Sugathapala Silva’s group, Ape Kattiya, he found not so much a vocation as a refuge from the dreariness of a day job. And with the plays he took part in there – like Boarding Karayo – he discovered his niche, as the bewildered everyman. This was to be his niche in the movies, too.

Lester Peries’s film of Gamperaliya focuses on the relationship between Nanda, Piyal, and Jinadasa. As such, it never gives the attention they deserve to the side characters. These characters were played by the Ape Kattiya troupe. Ranasinghe got the role of Baladasa, acting beside Wickrema Bogoda, Anula Karunatilake, and G. W. Surendra, all of whom had been trained and tutored by Sugathapala de Silva. Peries opted for these actors in his later work, epitomised unforgettably by his pairing of Bogoda and Karunatilake in the greatest love story adapted here, Golu Hadawatha. What he did for Bogoda and Karunatilake there, he did for Ranasinghe in his second film after Gamperaliya, Delovak Athara.

Towards the end of Delovak Athara, Ranasinghe sheds a tear. He is at his wit’s end: he has just told his mother and father that he will not let their servant-boy take the fall for his crime. Caught between two worlds – literally, the title of the film – he finds himself lost in this world, and in his thoughts. Then Willie Blake’s camera “frames him between two tree trunks, and catches the slow trickle of a tear down his cheek.” In The Lonely Artist, Philip Cooray contends that the scene lacks emotional depth: he argues that “the objectivity is all”, and that we “admire and appreciate, from afar.” In other words, Ranasinghe both moves us towards empathy for his plight and cuts us off from him.

If it didn’t do anything else, Delovak Athara revealed Ranasinghe as a leading man, but one capable of great emotional intensity. Contrary to what one Indian critic wrote on him, that he differed from the namby-pamby naivete of Indian actors, Ranasinghe did epitomise that kind of performance. Peries admittedly muted the emotional cadences of his character in Delovak Athara, but this did not, and could not, mute the actor’s intensity. There are scenes and sequences of great, raw emotional power in that film – such as when he confronts his girlfriend and confesses his crime to her – where you see nothing but desperation in his eyes. In Getawarayo, Gamini Fonseka typifies this same desperation, but it’s Ranasinghe who embodies it in a way that makes you really feel for him.

It’s hard to put a finger on such performances. Ranasinghe may have disagreed, but there is in his role as Nissanka, in Delovak Athara, a tinge of the early Brando and the early James Dean. Swineetha Weerasinghe once compared him to Gregory Peck, which is correct if you consider Peck’s patrician airs. But Ranasinghe lacks Peck’s seriousness, the humourless and emotionless appeal of Peck’s characters. The more comparable actors to his characters are James Dean and Marlon Brando. Except that where Dean and Brando tend to give way to their frenzies and emotional histrionics, Ranasinghe tones down, and goes in search of an emotional centre. In Delovak Athara he finds this centre in Weerasinghe’s character, Chitra; in Parasathumal, he finds it in Punya Heendeniya’s character.

The actor most comparable to Ranasinghe’s performances at this point was Montgomery Clift. Deeply sensitive and highly vulnerable, Montgomery’s characters symbolised a new, frustrated American youth, the sort that Dean and Brando would take even further. They are comparable to Ranasinghe’s characters, because, like the latter, they both cry out and tone down. In From Here to Eternity and A Place in the Sun, Clift grits his teeth, less out of anger than out of a frustrated sense of self-worth. He is angry not at what the world is doing to him, but at his inability to respond to the world.

In Delovak Athara Ranasinghe finds himself dominated by three women: his mother, his fiancée, and his friend Chitra. This is the type of situation Clift found his forte in, the type that distinguished Ranasinghe’s characters from Brando’s: whereas the latter couldn’t have bothered less about his predicament, Ranasinghe couldn’t have bothered more about his. In the end, that’s what made his performance in Peries’s film so evocative: not because he was sensitive, but because he cared, and got us to care about him.

(The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)