The consummate shape-shifter dies mid act

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kalabhavan Mani’s life cycle as an actor was perhaps the greatest magic show on silver screen in the last two decades. Unlike any other actor in the country, Mani seemed to have undergone thorough transformations almost every seven to eight years, shedding his old self absolutely like a butterfly from its pupa. His old comic self, for instance, is now a distant memory, his recent character roles offering not even a subtle hint of his former avatar.

If there was something like an electromagnetic spectrum for acting, which could have captured all possible ranges of acting, here was one man who could have filled it. The man was meticulously, in what looked like a scientific experiment of sorts, attempting to create an impossibly wide spectrum; from sidekick to superhero, from simpleton to villain, from blind man to old man, from nice to cruel, from crass to sober. Shockingly, the experiment has abruptly ended.

But even this incomplete ‘spectrum’ looks unbelievably iridescent. To begin with, he was a curly haired simpleton with a stylised smile and dumb wild expressions, mannerisms he brought to cinema from his mimicry days. But in his last most significant role, as the police constable alongside Kamal Haasan in Paapanasam (the Tamil version of Drishyam), he had a silent devilish menace that could send cats and dogs squirming in mortal fear. Not a single expression of constable Perumal could be traced to the old days when he acted as sidekick in films starring Jayaram and Dileep.

In fact, he virtually stopped doing comedy routines after his champion performance as a blind singer in Vinayan’s Vasanthiyum Lakshmiyum Pinne Njanum (1999). The end of the millennium also marked a new stage in Mani’s life cycle, as dramatic as the transformation from egg to caterpillar. Truth is, there were more stages to Kalabhavan’s career than a butterfly’s lifecycle.

He did his first major turn as villain in the Mammootty starrer Dadasaheb in the new millennium year, in 2000. It was this performance that fetched him major roles in Tamil and Telugu films. His role as Teja, the don who mimics animals, in Gemini (2002) made him a household name in both Tamil Nadu and Telugu.

It was this pan-South Indian popularity that made him attempt a hero role in Ben Johnson (2005). For the next three years, Mani was the darling of ‘B’ and ‘C’ centres. When superstar films bombed, Mani was hailed as the frontbench darling. There was also a time when folk singer Mani commanded the same price as Yesudas.

However, after 2013 when he gave sterling performance as the melancholic Looyi Paappan, Mani virtually vanished from the silver screen. As director Sibi Malayil, who introduced him, said: “By then his illness had overtaken him, and perhaps he might have also felt frustrated that the new trends did not have much space for him.”