Satyajit Ray

Ray was born in Calcutta in 1921 to author Sukumar Ray, and started as a commercial artist before a 1950 trip to London changed the trajectory. Watching De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and meeting Jean Renoir (in India shooting The River) pulled him toward narrative film. He returned and began Pather Panchali in 1955, scripting, casting, scoring, editing, and designing the credits himself. That film and its two sequels, Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959), became The Apu Trilogy. Over the next three decades he directed works including The Music Room (1958), The Big City (1963), Charulata (1964), and the Goopy-Bagha trilogy, while writing short fiction and creating recurring characters - Feluda the detective, Professor Shonku the scientist. He collected thirty-seven Indian National Film Awards, a Golden Lion, a Golden Bear, two Silver Bears, an honorary Oscar in 1992, and the Bharat Ratna the same year, weeks before his death on 23 April.