Satyajit Ray

Here's a time line of Satyajit Ray's life:

• 1921 - Born in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India (now West Bengal, India).
• 1923 - Ray was an only child whose father, Sukumar Ray, was a writer and illustrator of Bengali nonsense verse, died.
• 1940 - Graduated and attended art school at Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s rural university northwest of Calcutta.
• 1943 - Returning to Calcutta, Ray got a job in a British-owned advertising agency, became its art director within a few years, and also worked for a publishing house as a commercial illustrator, becoming a leading Indian typographer and book-jacket designer.
• 1947 - Ray had long been an avid filmgoer, and his deepening interest in the medium inspired his first attempts to write screenplays and his cofounding of the Calcutta Film Society.
• 1949 - Ray married Bijoya Das, his first cousin and long-time sweetheart.[14] The couple had a son, Sandip Ray, a film director. In the same year, Ray was encouraged in his cinematic ambitions by the French director Jean Renoir, who was then in Bengal to shoot The River.
• 1952 - The success of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), with its downbeat story and its economy of means—location shooting with nonprofessional actors—convinced Ray that he should attempt to film Pather Panchali.
• 1956 - Pather Panchali was completed in 1955 and turned out to be both a commercial and a tremendous critical success, first in Bengal and then in the West following a major award at the 1956 Cannes International Film Festival.
• 1959 - Completes the other two films of the trilogy: Aparajito (1956; The Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (1959; The World of Apu).
• 1961 - Teen Kanya (1961; “Three Daughters,” English-language title Two Daughters) is a varied trilogy of short films about women that made an impact on the then Bengali culture of treating women.
• 1962 - Kanchenjungha (1962), Ray’s first original screenplay and first colour film, a subtle exploration of arranged marriage among wealthy, westernized Bengalis.
• 1964 - Ray’s finest films based on a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, who was the principal creative influence on the director, Charulata (1964; The Lonely Wife), a tragic love triangle set within a wealthy, Western-influenced Bengali family in 1879, is perhaps Ray’s most accomplished film.
• 1965 - The Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan and the highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, shortly before his death.
• 1969 - Although humour is evident in almost all of Ray’s films, it is particularly marked in the comedy Parash Pathar (1957; The Philosopher’s Stone) and in the musical Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969; The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha), based on a story by his grandfather.
• 1973 - With an exception of his moving story of the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, Ahsani Sanket (1973; Distant Thunder)—chiefly concerns Calcutta and modern Calcuttans.
• 1975 - Mahanagar (1963; The Big City) and a trilogy of films made in the 1970s—Pratidwandi (1970; The Adversary), Seemabaddha (1971; Company Limited), and Jana Aranya (1975; The Middleman)—examine the struggle for employment of the middle class against a background (from 1970) of revolutionary, Maoist-inspired violence, government repression, and insidious corruption.
• 1977 - Ray considered making a film on the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War but later abandoned the idea, saying that, as a filmmaker, he was more interested in the travails of the refugees and not the politics
• 1979 - At the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979, he was awarded with the Honorable Prize for the contribution to cinema.
• 1980 - After a gap in which Ray made Pikoo (1980) and then fell ill with heart disease, he returned to the subject of corruption in society.
• 1982 - When E.T. was released in 1982, Clarke and Ray saw similarities in the film to his earlier The Alien script; Ray claimed that E.T. plagiarised his script. Ray said that Steven Spielberg's film "would not have been possible without my script of 'The Alien' being available throughout America in mimeographed copies." Spielberg denied any plagiarism by saying, "I was a kid in high school when this script was circulating in Hollywood." (Spielberg actually graduated high school in 1965 and released his first film in 1968).[72] Besides The Alien, two other unrealised projects that Ray had intended to direct were adaptations of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahābhārata, and E. M. Forster's 1924 novel A Passage to India.
  At the Venice Film Festival, where he had previously won a Golden Lion for Aparajito (1956), he was awarded the Golden Lion Honorary Award in 1982. That same year, he received an honorary "Hommage à Satyajit Ray" award at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. Ray is the second film personality after Charlie Chaplin to have been awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford University.
• 1983 - While working on Ghare Baire (Home and the World), Ray suffered a heart attack; it would severely limit his productivity in the remaining 9 years of his life. Ghare Baire, an adaptation of the novel of the same name, was completed in 1984 with the help of Ray's son, who served as a camera operator from then-onward.
• 1985 - He was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
• 1986 - Ray recovered to an extent to direct the 1990 film Shakha Proshakha (Branches of the Tree). It depicts an old man, who has lived a life of honesty, and learns of the corruption of three of his sons. The final scene shows the father finding solace only in the companionship of his fourth son, who is uncorrupted but mentally ill due to a head injury sustained while he was studying in England.
• 1987 - He was awarded the Legion of Honor by the President of France.
• 1992 - Ray's health deteriorated due to heart complications. He was admitted to a hospital but never recovered.
  Twenty-four days before his death, Ray was presented with an Honorary Academy Award by Audrey Hepburn via video-link; he was in a gravely ill condition, but gave an acceptance speech, calling it the "best achievement of [his] movie-making career". The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ray an Honorary Award in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement.
  He was posthumously awarded the Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Directing at the San Francisco International Film Festival; it was accepted on his behalf by actress Sharmila Tagore.
  
  Ray died on 23 April, 9 days before his 71st birthday.
  
  

  

"If the theme is simple, you can include a hundred details that create the illusion of actuality better."

-- Satyajit Ray, Filmmaker

Read more about this incredible human being and visionary filmmaker on his Wikipedia entry.