Basheer walks whistling by the side of a great big fence that separated jail from jail. He stops mid-tune, hearing a peculiar female voice, asking who is whistling out there. Basheer’s face brightens up at this unexpected company in a jail, a voice in the void left behind by the inmates who were no longer there. She asks his name, he hers. Narayani, says she; beautiful name, says he. Aged 22, says she; beautiful age, says he. In Mathilukal – meaning “fences” – a film made by Adoor Gopalakrishnan based on the writings of Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, this is the only way we know Narayani – as a voice across a fence. KPAC Lalitha, that treasured artist of Malayalam cinema, leads a beautiful love story just by her voice, opposite Mammootty’s Basheer.
When she passed away from an illness on the night of February 22, tributes that poured in remembered the voice that created magic on the screen. In Mathilukal, it was a voice that seemed to pick up a fallen man and give him love. Without seeing a person behind the voice, you’d get hooked onto the modulation, the emotion that came through the words. When Lalitha appeared on the screen with so many differing expressions on her, the voice became but one of the reasons to admire the actor in her.
From the first role in Kootukudumbam (1969) to award winning characters in Amaram (1991) and Santham (2001), up to the final releases like Varane Avashyamundu (2020) and Home (2021), Lalitha has a filmography of more than 500, in 52 years. The comedy in Manichithrathazhu, the pathos in Manasinakkare, the villainy in Malootty and the numerous characters she etched out in her long career made her a queen of emotions. It was like she came with a remote, and every time you pressed a button, Lalitha simply converted her whole self into the type you asked for. When she was sad it was not just tears or a sad face you saw on the screen, but her whole body appeared to weaken. When she was plotting schemes, her eyes narrowed, the colour went away and the face of the ever-patient mother changed into a conniving old woman’s.
Watch: Narayani's intro in Mathilukal
She was naively young when she first came to cinema, but carrying a history with her already, being part of the legendary theatre group Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC). Director Sethumadhavan, who made many memorable films of the time -- the 1960s, – saw a staging of KPAC’s Koottukudumbam, after deciding to adapt it to a film. He picked up four actors from the stage for his film – one of them was Lalitha, then 22, to play the role of the heroine’s (actor Saradha) sister.
In her autobiography Katha Thudarum, Lalitha wrote that she wasn’t keen to act in movies, and was scared when her co-actor Bhavani told her stories of how the director would scold and humiliate the actors in front of everyone. She tried to back out of the film and Sethumadhavan quietly got her first scene shot without letting her know she was on camera, to allay her fears.
Lalitha's autobiography, Katha Thudarum
One may wonder why she’d be so scared. It was from the world of theatre that Lalitha came to films. And it was through learning dance that she reached theatre. From the day she began acting, she had wanted to become part of the KPAC, she wrote in her book. She calls the day, September 4, 1964, the day that changed everything for her and made her the Lalitha she later got known as – that was the day she was chosen to be an actor with the troupe. Thoppil Bhasi, who wrote iconic plays for the troupe around communism which helped popularise the Communist Party in Kerala, became a close aide of Lalitha. She writes affectionately of Bhasi chettan in the book.
In her early days of cinema, Lalitha often played a sibling or friend of the leading actors. Her spontaneous gestures and dialogue delivery got immediate attention. Those days, she also dubbed for Saradha in movies like Abhijathyam and Badradeepam.
Lalitha, after acting in a drama for KPAC
As the years passed on, she began to play what came to be called character roles – the patient mother, the jealous elder sister, the harsh mother-in-law, the irritable neighbour. Lalitha would become so integral to a film that you would take her role for granted, like an inevitable prop in the tale.
Even in the 1980s, she never stuck to one kind of role. An almost permanent fixture in Sathyan Anthikad movies, Lalitha played the greedy elder sister in Sandhesham and Mohanlal’s Varavelpu and TP Balagopalan MA. When she paired with comic veteran Innocent, the couple would produce some of the most delightful scenes on the screen – the tying of a sacred thread by the wife on the husband in Manichithrathazhu is only one of the examples of their hilarious ventures. In Godfather, they brought laughs by sneaking into a wedding with huge vessels inverted on their heads and then banging them against each other. In Innale, they played a pair of theatre actors disguised as the parents of a young woman with amnesia, only to mess the whole thing up.
Watch: Innocent and Lalitha in Manichithrathazhu
In the same period, she played the sweet forgiving mother in Thalayanamanthram and the abusive mother-in-law in Malooty, both with actor Urvashi. Lalitha didn’t have any qualms in switching from a warm mother that the audience would love to a hateful woman they’d curse. But she’d be more likely remembered for all the crying she did on the screen (in her book, she mentions she easily cried in life too).
Her crying in films would seem so very real that you couldn’t picture Lalitha onscreen without at least one instance of loud sobs and a cracked voice emerging through it. She could be quietly sad too. In Manasinakkare, a movie that marked the comeback of yesteryear actor Sheela, Lalitha played a neighbour and friend who had to go away to a foreign land to look after her grandchildren. Her words come out split between a smile and a few tears as she says that the children want her for a servant, not as a mother. It is heartbreaking when she says goodbye to Sheela’s character, ordering her not to come see her off because she couldn’t bear it.
Watch: KPAC Lalitha in Manasinakkare
She won her first National Award for her role in Amaram, one of the films made by her late husband, legendary director Bharathan. Lalitha played the outspoken fisherwoman in the Mammootty film. Often in Bharathan’s films, Lalitha would play the loudmouth or the evil plotter. She became the old-fashioned mother in Venkalam, plotting to have both her sons married to the same woman, since that was the family tradition though the children did not want it.
Versatility continued to be her trademark in the 1990s. Within the same movie, Lalitha could turn from bitter to soft in minutes. The strict mother in Aniyathipravu, who orders her sons to punish her daughter for finding a man of her choice, melts as she watches the young woman suppress her desires for the family’s sake.
Watch: Climax in Aniyathipravu
Lalitha was one of the actors who began playing much older characters from the beginning, so that when age finally caught up, she simply settled into the many roles she was prematurely doing. One of her final memorable performances was as Akashavani in Varane Avashyamundo, sharing a special bond with a young man (Dulquer Salmaan) and a boy. A few years before that, she played one of the protagonists in Thanichalla Njan, along with late actor Kalpana, telling the real life story of two women, bonded by love that conquers the differences in their faith. Around the same time, she also played a role in her son Siddharth’s directorial debut, Nidra.
If you try counting the memorable characters she leaves behind it will not be easy -- the loud granny in Niram, the funny sister in Sreekrishnapurathe Nakshathrathilakkam (another one with Innocent), the woman broken between a sparring father (Thilakan) and son (Mohanlal) in Spadikam, the nice teacher in Kadinjool Kalyanam… there are just too many. It is plain that Lalitha will be missed.