Firdous Bamji | |
|---|---|
 Bamji in 1997 | |
| Born | Firdous Esadvaster Bamji 3 May 1966 |
| Education | St. Christopher's School, Bahrain, Kodaikanal International School, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, University of South Carolina |
| Occupation(s) | Actor, writer |
| Spouse | Erin Thigpen (m. 1990;div. 1995) |
| Partner(s) | Hayley Mills (1997–present) |
Bamji was born in Bombay, India, to a Parsi family that was residing in Bahrain. [1] [2] His father, Esadvaster, was the regional representative for Norwich Union Life Insurance Society. His mother, Roshan, was a homemaker, and both his parents were active in various civic organizations. [3] [4] [5]
Bamji attended St. Christopher's School, Bahrain, a British private school, till the age of ten. In 1977, he and his two brothers were sent to Kodaikanal International School, an American boarding school in the mountains of South India. [2] He later attended the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and the University of South Carolina, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in journalism and a Master of Fine Arts.
During his last years in undergraduate school he began acting at Columbia's first professional theatre, Trustus, where the iconoclastic artistic director, Jim Thigpen [6] [7] took him under his wing. At Trustus he played a variety of roles, including Pale in Burn This, Torch in Beirut, Danny in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Peter Patrone in The Heidi Chronicles and all the parts in Eric Bogosian's solo play, Drinking in America. [8]
After studying for an MFA in Theatre at USC, Bamji moved to Washington, D.C., to finish his degree as an apprentice at The Shakespeare Theatre. In 1994 he was cast in Eric Bogosian's SubUrbia at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater, and he and his then wife, Erin Thigpen, sold the car and moved to New York City. [9] [10] Bamji has appeared on stages in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles and major regional theaters around the United States. [11] He has played leading roles in world and American premieres of plays by playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, [12] [13] Tony Kushner, [14] [15] Naomi Wallace, Rebecca Gilman and Eric Bogosian. [9]
In 2007, he was invited by director Simon McBurney to co-write and perform in a new play with the British company Complicité. The piece was to revolve around the relationship between two pure mathematicians who lived at the turn of the 20th century, the self-taught genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Cambridge University don, G. H. Hardy. Bamji had been interested in this story for a few years and was working on a film script when he was approached by McBurney. [16] [17] The result was A Disappearing Number , [18] [19] which won the Laurence Olivier Award and the Critics Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. [20] Over the next four years, A Disappearing Number toured Europe, Australia, India and the United States [21] and finished its universally acclaimed run at the Novello Theatre in London's West End. [22]
Bamji's television credits include Law & Order and Law & Order SVU and his film credits include The Sixth Sense , [23] Unbreakable , Analyze That , Ashes, Justice and The War Within , for which he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination. [24] [25] [26] [27] In 2015 he received an Obie Award for his performance in Roundabout Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink . [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] He has narrated more than twenty audio books, including The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky, [35] Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Camille by Alexandre Dumas, [36] The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, [37] [38] [39] Six Graves to Munich by Mario Puzo, and The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie, for which he received an Audie Award nomination. [40] [41]
Bamji lives in London with his partner, British actress Hayley Mills.
Sir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. Stoppard was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Cherlynne Theresa Thigpen was an American actress of stage and screen. She was known for her role as "The Chief" of ACME Crimenet in the game show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and various spinoffs, and for her role as "Luna" in the Playhouse Disney children's series Bear in the Big Blue House. For her varied television work, Thigpen was nominated for six Daytime Emmy Awards. She won a Tony Award in 1997 for portraying Dr. Judith Kaufman in An American Daughter, and also played Ella Farmer on The District (2000–2003).
Eric Bogosian is an American actor, playwright, monologuist, novelist, and historian. Descended from Armenian-American immigrants, he grew up in Watertown and Woburn, Massachusetts, and attended the University of Chicago and Oberlin College. His numerous plays include Talk Radio (1987) and subUrbia (1994), which were adapted to film by Oliver Stone and Richard Linklater, respectively, with Bogosian starring in the former.
Amitav Ghosh is an Indian writer. He won the 54th Jnanpith award in 2018, India's highest literary honor. Ghosh's ambitious novels use complex narrative strategies to probe the nature of national and personal identity, particularly of the people of India and South Asia. He has written historical fiction and also written non-fiction works discussing topics such as colonialism and climate change.
The Obie Awards or Off-Broadway Theater Awards are annual awards given since 1956 by The Village Voice newspaper to theatre artists and groups involved in off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions in New York City. Starting just after the 2014 ceremony, the American Theatre Wing is joint presenter and administrative manager of the Obie Awards. The Obie Awards are considered off-Broadway's highest honor, similar to the Tony Awards for Broadway productions.
Roger Rees was a Welsh actor and director, widely known for his stage work. He won an Olivier Award and a Tony Award for his performance as the lead in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. He also received Obie Awards for his role in The End of the Day and as co-director of Peter and the Starcatcher. Rees was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in November 2015.
SubUrbia is a play by Eric Bogosian chronicling the nighttime activities of a group of aimless 20-somethings still living in their suburbian New Jersey hometown and their reunion with a former high school classmate, Pony, who has become a successful musician. Pony's return strips away illusions and excuses to reveal the meaningless dead-end existences of everyone.
The Hungry Tide (2004) is the fourth novel by Indian-born author, Amitav Ghosh. Set in the Sundarbans, it follows an unlikely trio who travel up river together to find the rare Irrawaddy dolphin. It won the 2004 Hutch Crossword Book Award for Fiction.
Indian Ink is a 1995 play by Tom Stoppard based on his 1991 radio play In the Native State.
Austin Campbell Pendleton is an American actor, playwright, theatre director, and instructor.
The Calcutta Chromosome is a 1995 English-language novel by Indian author Amitav Ghosh. The book, set in Calcutta and New York City at some unspecified time in the future, is a medical thriller that dramatizes the adventures of people who are brought together by a mysterious turn of events. The book is loosely based on the life and times of Sir Ronald Ross, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who achieved a breakthrough in malaria research in 1898. The novel was the recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1997.
Robert Falls is an American theater director and the current artistic director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.
Bonbibi, is a legendary lady of the forest, dubbed as a guardian spirit of the forests and venerated by both the Hindu and the Muslim residents of the Sundarbans. She is called upon mostly by the honey-collectors and the woodcutters before entering the forest for protection against the attacks from the tigers. It is believed that the demon king, Dakkhin Rai, an arch-enemy of Banbibi actually appears in the disguise of a tiger and attacks human beings.
Daniel Eric Gold is an American actor. He attended Lee Strasberg's Theater Institute as a teenager, and went on to graduate from Penn State in 1996, with a degree in Theater Arts.
Robert Lloyd Stanton is an American actor, director and playwright.
Carey Elizabeth Perloff is an American theater director, playwright, author, and educator. She was the artistic director of American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco from 1992 to June 2018.
The Ibis trilogy is a work of historical fiction by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, consisting of the novels Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015). A work of postcolonial literature, the story is set across the Indian Ocean region during the 1830s in the lead-up to the First Opium War. It particularly focuses on the trade of opium between India and China and the trafficking of girmityas to Mauritius. The series has received critical acclaim and academic attention for its historical research, themes and ambition. A television series adaptation was announced to be in development in 2019.
Flood of Fire is a 2015 novel by Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh. Following the Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), the novel is the final installment of the Ibis trilogy, which concerns the 19th-century opium trade between India and China. The book was first published by the English publisher John Murray, and later by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States. The novel was shortlisted for The Hindu Literary Prize and received the Crossword Book Jury Award in Fiction in 2015.
Tushar Kanjilal was an Indian social worker, political activist, environmentalist, writer and headmaster of Rangabelia High School. He was the founder of a non governmental organization, which merged with the Tagore Society for Rural Development, a social organization working for the upliftment of the rural people in Sunderbans region, in the Indian state of West Bengal.
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable is a 2016 non-fiction book by Indian writer Amitav Ghosh discussing climate change. In it, Ghosh discusses the cultural depictions, history and politics of climate change, and its relationship to colonialism.
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