Paul Bhattacharjee

Paul Bhattacharjee
Bhattacharjee in Casino Royale
Born	Gautam Paul Bhattacharjee 4 May 1960 Harrow, London, England
Disappeared	10 July 2013 London, England
Died	c.12 July 2013 (age 53) Seaford, East Sussex, England
Body discovered	12 July 2013
Nationality	British
Occupation	Actor
Years active	1979–2013
Height	6 ft 0 in (1.83 m)

Gautam Paul Bhattacharjee (4 May 1960 – c. 12 July 2013) was a British actor of Indian ethnicity of stage, film and television.

The only son of Gautam Bhattacharjee, a member of the Indian Communist Party who had to flee from the country in 1942, and Anne, a woman from a family of Russian Jewish descent, he was educated at state schools in Harrow. In the 1970s, Paul was a member of "The Young Theatre" at North Harrow where he was very involved in their productions (including an early role in The Thwarting of Baron Bolligrew in 1974) and began to learn his trade as an actor. An association with Jatinder Verma and his theatre company Tara Arts began in 1979, when he was, according to Verma "passionately idealistic, both artistically and politically" and had the desire "to use theatre to change the world". Bhattacharjee appeared in Yes Memsahib (1979), "the story of the formation of modern East Africa by colonial Indian 'coolie' labour", and Diwali (1980), which he also directed, "the story behind the annual Festival of Lights", among other productions.

Bhattacharjee's first regular television role was in the short-lived soap Albion Market (1985) in which his character was charged by the police for the murder of a racist; it was the actor's work as a teenage anti-racism activist which had led to his first meeting with Jatinder Verma in 1977. He played Omar Khayyam, a narrator named after the poet, in Iranian Nights (1989) by Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali, at the Royal Court, a satirical response to the controversy over Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which was later shown in a television version on Channel 4.

He had successfully taken over Art Malik's role in the West End run (at the Aldwych Theatre) of Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard in 1995 after originally playing the character's son, and had appeared in Murmuring Judges (Royal National Theatre, 1991), one of the plays in David Hare's trilogy examining British institutions.