Douglas Ranasinghe: Second to none
By Uditha Devapriya
Sena, the protagonist of Madawala S. Ratnayake’s Akkara Paha, embodies for me the hopes and frustrations of the rural Sinhala youth after 1956. Lester James Peries selected Milton Jayawardena, then an unknown player, for the role in his adaptation. Days after he finalised the casting he was visited by Vijaya Kumaratunga.
I think it was a blessing, for both Milton and Vijaya, that the former got to play the character and the latter did not, because Vijaya would have been too brash to depict Sena’s failings and defeatism. Sena is an eminently passive character, whose role in the film is to be used and guided by every other character, in particular the woman who ends up as his destroyer, Theresa, and his friend in the first half of the story, Samare.
Theresa was played by the underrated Janaki Kurukulasuriya, who left the industry soon afterwards, while Samare was played by Douglas Ranasinghe, who stayed in the industry and remains there today. His performance in Peries’s film was so assertive, so unlike the more nuanced, gentle characters he would get to play later, that no less a person than the director remarked that he had great difficulty saving the protagonist from him. This view has been shared by Philip Cooray in his book, The Lonely Artist.
Most of our supporting actors from the earliest days graduated into stars, especially Joe Abeywickrama. Some of them, however, remained behind, perhaps because that’s where they were meant to be: think of D. R. Nanayakkara. Douglas Ranasinghe belongs to neither category, strictly speaking, and for this reason he has managed to distinguish himself. And in distinguishing himself, he has managed to transcend his limitations.
Ranasinghe got to be the secondary player, the supporting actor, in whatever film he was cast in. This has been his biggest strength and limitation, though within his limitations he gives out the best he could. You feel that some of his performances – think of Siridasa from Viragaya – are so calculated that they rise above the main actor. Then you feel that his other performances – think of Kulageya – have him as a side player, whose main function is to propel the narrative, or – think of Aravinda from Yuganthaya here – to serve as the voice of the establishment, of sanity, of plain common sense.
He was born in Kurunegala and was initially sent to the game iskole, the hodiya panthiya. From the hodiya panthiya he was sent to St Anne’s College, where he grew to dote on athletics and other sports. At school he ended up as a Prefect.
“St Anne’s was a missionary school, but unlike today missionary schools took in quite a number of non-Christians. In fact one of my schoolmates was Wijeratne Warakagoda, who was my senior, and who later left to Ananda College.”
Apparently his first love had been the military. This encouraged him to apply for the post of Police Sub Inspector. Failing twice, he succeeded on the third attempt, and was drafted for a training course at Kalutara. By then he had also decided to join Law College.
“Acting never really figured in my scheme. That’s not to say that I shirked the performing arts, but in my day, films and plays were at best leisure activities, never career options. By default, as professions, we had either the government service, the Civil Service, or fields like law, medicine, accountancy, and of course engineering.”
Ranasinghe’s forays into the performing arts were quite accidental. A series of encounters led him to his friend Sathischandra Edirisinghe, who asked Ranasinghe to take his place and play his role, that of a Corporal, in a production of Hunuwataye Kathawa.
“The training course in Kalutara was delayed by three months. Sathis aiya had done me a favour years earlier. I was only too happy to help him out.”
It was a rather auspicious debut, since after seeing his performance, Lester James Peries asked after him, took him in, and cast him opposite Milton Jayawardena in Akkara Paha. Jayasena had, naturally enough, been suspicious.
“He laughed and told Lester, ‘Now, now, you are taking all my good actors away!’”
His role as Samare had been his second, after G. D. L. Perera’s Romeo Juliet Kathawak, released in 1968 but filmed after Akkara Paha. The film is remembered for the Sunil Shantha classic that Ranasinghe croons with a guitar, My Dreams Are Roses. As for Akkara Paha, he remembers his experiences working under Lester Peries with nostalgia.
“With ‘Maestro’, you have got to be sure of what you do. He never bosses you around, but that doesn’t mean you can be complacent or that you can forget your cues. He expects something from you, and opts for three takes. When all three are done, you go for the final take. Because nothing escapes his eyes, you need to remember all three.”
What of his career after these two roles? After taking part in a short film titled Bhavana, directed by the great Paul Zils and entered into the Berlin Film Festival of 1970/1971, he chose to leave for England for a three-year course at the London Film School. The decision, he tells me, was both conscious and spontaneous.
“I left behind a career in law just so I could learn more about filmmaking and acting. At the end of those years, I was asked to stay back and take part in stage productions, to get involved with the Royal Shakespearean Company. But I became homesick. So I came back. Had I stayed behind, I would have been a different man. Who can tell?”
In this second phase after his return, Ranasinghe becomes more restrained in his acting. He has by now weeded out the emotional hysterics which marked out Romeo Juliet Kathawak and Akkara Paha. Those three years in London had clearly helped.
Opposite his co-stars, he has distinguished himself well: Richard de Zoysa, Chitra Vakishta, and Somi Ratnayake in Yuganthaya; Sanath Gunathilake and Sriyani Amarasena in Viragaya; Vasanthi Chathurani, Sriyani, Lucky Dias, and Tony Ranasinghe in Kulageya. We see him in glimpses now: Siddhartha Gautama, Aloko Udapadi, and Dharma Yuddhaya. In his recent performances he has mellowed well. His most distinctive features, in particular his square, firm jaw, continue to lend him both credibility and force.
Yet for some reason, to me at least, his performance as Aravinda in Yuganthaya doesn’t come out as convincingly as his roles in Viragaya or Kulageya. In Martin Wickramasinghe’s novel, Aravinda is a flawed antihero, a parvenu who wishes to join the upper classes. Lester Peries finds an equivalent, somehow, for Ranasinghe through sequences which have him silently wondering through his village and through scenes of him cautioning Malin (Richard de Zoysa) against the latter’s radical tendencies. But we never get used to his performance, because in his other roles he does not caution against rebellion but eventually sides with the rebel. In Yuganthaya, by contrast, he sides with the Establishment.
It is of course a tragedy at one level, but I think we have ignored Ranasinghe’s versatility. For one thing, in addition to film, he has operated in theatre, television, and radio. Not every actor in Sri Lanka has aspired for, much less taken part in, all these fields, which is why his involvement in them throughout his career deserves scrutiny. A comprehensive biography or autobiography has clearly become a need of the hour.
The writer is an international relations analyst, independent researcher, and freelance columnist who can be reached at .
