Mumbai: He walked kilometres to school in the hills of Shimla, climbed a 20,000-ft peak in Ladakh in his seventies, and trekked through Antarctica and South America. Somewhere in between, Vijay Mohan Crishna became one of India’s most quietly distinguished actors straddling stage and screen. Best known for playing Shah Rukh Khan’s stern father in Devdas and for his decades-long association with Mahesh Dattani‘s Dance Like a Man, Crishna—former executive director of Godrej Industries—passed away on March 4, aged 80. The cause of death has not been disclosed.Crishna’s acting life began on a Delhi stage in the 1960s, where the young man from Shimla discovered theatre—and, by happy accident, a fellow theatregoer named Amitabh Bachchan. By 1971 he had moved to Mumbai, throwing himself into its theatre scene. He played a tender gangster in Pearl Padamsee’s play Orphans, took the title role in Alyque Padamsee’s tantric-inflected Macbeth, and directed Shaw’s Saint Joan. His greatest association, though, was Dattani’s Dance Like a Man—as Jairaj, a Bharatanatyam dancer past his prime—a role he performed on stage for over 25 years and reprised in Ritesh Menon’s 2014 film adaptation.His tryst with cinema began with Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) but it was Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas (2002) that gave him his most memorable screen moment — as the stern, heartbreaking patriarch Narayan. He later appeared in Guzaarish and Hirani’s PK.None of this was his only life. After eight years of management experience in Kolkata and five years in advertising in Mumbai, he had joined Lawkim Ltd in 1977 and helped turn the bankrupt company taken over by the Godrej Group around. Crishna, who then served Godrej Enterprises Group for 45 years, stepped down from the board in 2021 due to advancing age. A lover of wildlife, hiking and racing, his greatest relaxation, he once said, was the daily drive to the workplace in Vikhroli.Actor Anupam Kher expressed his grief and co-actor Lillete Dubey wrote on Instagram: “RIP my Jairaj… you will never be forgotten.” He is survived by wife Smita Crishna-Godrej and daughters Nyrika Holkar and Freyan Crishna Bieri.
