School & beginnings of acting Shakespeare –
St. Lawrence School had to be temporarily shifted to Dum Dum as the building was taken over by the British Army because World War II had broken out. It was too far, and Utpal was shifted to St. Xavier's Collegiate School. He was in the ninth standard when his first known acting performance took place. He played the second gravedigger in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It was directed by Jesuit Father Weaver, who had been attached to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. At this stage, Utpal began reading with incredible voracity: even in his teens, he was reading Hegel, Feuerbach and Kant, in addition to Lenin, Marx, and Engels. He was also reading Stalin and closely following the exploits of the Red Army. Marxist ideals had begun to take shape in his mind.

This was also the year in which IPTA was formed, of which Dutt was to briefly be a part later, in the early 1950s. Utpal was drawn to Communist Party's activities and its ideologies manifested through IPTA. The Famine of Bengal soon followed, and Utpal watched with awe the kind of impact IPTA's production of Bijan Bhattacharya's seminal play Nabanna had. By now he was aware of theatre's power to lend voice to the voiceless.

Dutt entered St. Xavier's College. The three years he spent there would prove to be pivotal in the making of his artistic life. The annual college plays held great attraction for him, and Utpal was sure that he wanted to be a professional actor. The well-stacked library at Xavier's was his haunt and he spent hours reading Shakespeare, Stanislavski, Brecht and other greats of theatre. He read widely and voraciously, a quality that would stay with him his whole life.

Meeting 'Guru' Geoffrey Kendal-
Utpal Dutt formed his first theatre group, The Amateur Shakespeareans, in October 1947 to stage select scenes from Shakespeare's plays. Geoffrey Kendal, founder of Shakespeareana, was touring Calcutta in late 1947 when he happened upon Dutt's production of Richard III, which Dutt had directed and performed in. Kendal was suitably impressed and offered him a position in his touring troupe.

Experiment with Julius Caesar and the birth of LTG
The Amateur Shakespeareans famously staged a modernised version of Julius Caeser which marked a crucial step in Utpal Dutt's creative and political consciousness, and the merging of the two. At this point, Utpal was deeply inspired by the political philosophy of Karl Marx and was closely following international political developments. This was evident in his interpretation of Julius Caesar, where the participants were dressed in Italian fascist uniforms. Caesar's senators greeted him with the raised one-arm salute and Mark Antony's speech was presented as a radio broadcast. The production was widely acclaimed and demonstrated the maturation of Dutt's political ideas

In the same year, The Amateur Shakespeareans was renamed as “Little Theatre Group” (LTG), which gained popularity as Dutt's own group and subsequently staged some of his most iconic plays.

Film Debut and venturing into Bengali theatre -
Dutt and his Little Theatre Group staged their first Bengali play, a translation of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts.

Utpal's first film, Michael Madhusudan, came out. He had played the lead role. He was waiting for an opportunity to make a living as a professional actor, and this film gave him that opportunity (stage acting was not financially adequate). Director Modhu Bose had seen him perform in Othello, and chose him for the role. Utpal reprised the role of Michael Madhusudan Dutt in Kaliprasad Ghosh's Vidyasagar, which came out in the same year, and then in Modhu Bose's Mahakabi Girish Chandra.

Short stint at IPTA and initiation into street theatre - At the behest of Salil Chowdhury and Niranjan Sen, the General Secretary of IPTA, Utpal joined the Association. He joined the Central Calcutta Squad, managed by Ritwik Ghatak. His stint continued for 10 months, during which he acted in Tagore's Bisarjan (two instances directed by himself and by Ghatak), Officer, Panu Pal's Voter Bhet, Dalil and Bhanga Bandar. Soon, political differences erupted between him and the IPTA honchos, owing to which, they severed ties.

Back at his group LTG, Dutt started doing street theatre, with a play called Passport about the trauma of Partition.

Political Theatre and working with Ritwik Ghatak - Acted in Panu Paul's landmark street play "Voter Bhet" which was used to promote a communist party candidate against the congress party candidate in the general elections. Alongside Utpal Dutt and Panu Paul, a 26 year-old Ritwik Ghatak featured in the play. The CPI candidate's win was largley attributed to the impact this play had on the farmers who formed the majority of the electorate.

Starts writing Bengali plays - Bengali. Dutt, who had written an English play named Balshezzar at college, had so far been hesitating citing his limited command over Bengali in the initial days. He finally gave in and wrote Chhayanot, his first play. Over the decades that followed, he went on to write over 70 plays.

First hit play and entering Minerva - Dutt's "Angaar", which he based on a coal mine disaster at Dhanbad where the owner flooded his coal mines, killing the mine workers stuck there, was staged and gained massive popularity. It went on to run for more than a hundred shows and traveled to other parts of India. It marked Utpal's first great success as a playwright-director. Political goons attacked and stopped the play on one occasion.

Utpal leased the historical Minerva Theatre of Calcutta for 99 years. LTG would operate from there and some of his most iconic works would be staged there. For Utpal, it was a step towards encouraging more professionalism in Bengali politicial theatre.

He married Shobha Sen, a fellow actor and dramatist of great repute.

Famously lent his voice to Uttam Kumar performing Othello in a scene from the popular Bengali film Saptapadi. Uttam, despite being a skilled actor, lacked the proficiency in English to pull off the scene, and Utpal voiced for him. In the same vein, Jennifer Kapoor voiced Suchitra Sen playing Desdemona in the same scene. Two years later, his voice was used in a similar scene in a Tamil film called Raththa Thilagam in which Sivaji Ganesan performed the role of Othello.

Dutt's directorial debut as a filmmaker, Megh, was released. He played the protagonist, a murderous schizophrenic.

Dutt's historic play Kallol about the Naval Mutiny of 1943 in which he alleged that the Congress party was hand-in-glove with the British administration in quelling the movement. He claimed to have access to crucial documents substantiating the story. The play created a sensation for its politics and for innovations in its lighting and stagecraft - realistic battle scenes and showing a real tank on the stage. It was a runaway hit but some newspapers refused to run ads promoting the play. Amidst the controversy, Satyajit Ray came out in Dutt's support.

An article by him came out in the Desh Hitaish'i magazine, where he laid bare the hypocrisies in the political and cultural establishment. His rant was seen as seditious and on 23 September, Utpal Dutt was arrested under the Defence of India Act. He was in Presidency Jail for seven months, but even within prison, staged plays and hosted workshops with inmates. Staged political plays like Louhomanob and Congor Karagare jointly with the prisoners. Bengali-Norwegian poet Nirmal Brahmachari and dramatist Jochhan Dastidar, who were also in prison at the time, have chronicled Utpal's exploits in jail.

Dutt's second film as a director, Ghoom Bhangar Gaan, was released. It was about a mill worker who stays away from a worker's strike to further his son's musical ambitions, but their lives change forever when the union leader dies. The film was hailed by critics and intelligentsia but didn't work at the box office.

Utpal was released. His followers celebrated and observed "Kallol Victory Day"

His first non-Bengali film, Merchant Ivory's Shakespeare Wallah released. It was about a troupe traveling through India and playing Shakespeare, much like the real-life Shakespeareana which Dutt was also a part of. The film was largely inspired from the exploits of the Kendal family, consisting of Geoffrey Kendal, his wife Laura Lidell and daughters Jennifer and Felicity, traveling through India performing Shakespeare's plays. In the film, the real-life Kendals play the fictional Buckingham family staging Shakespeare in a fast changing India, where their art form was being overshadowed by the ubiquitous Hindi film. The old order is also represented by a Maharajah, played by Utpal Dutt, who is witness to his royal legacy being relegated to the past. The film brought Utpal together with Geoffrey Kendal, who he considers his theatre guru. It was Utpal's first work outside Bengali cinema, also his first collaboration with Merchant-Ivory, with whom he would go on to make two other films, The Guru (1969) and Bombay Talkie (1970)

Ironically, around the same time, he was filming for his next Merchant-Ivory project 'Guru' at The Taj Hotel in Mumbai when the police arrested him once again. A warrant had been issued apropos his play Teer which was about the Naxalite movement. Dutt went in hiding for a while. In his book "Toward a Revolutionary Theatre", Dutt mentions that he was in Bombay for "delivery of weapons for the revolution" in addition to the shoot of Guru. He managed to travel incognito and checked in to a hotel under the name "S. Chowdhury". CID officers and some plainsclothes policemen from Calcutta nabbed him and flew him to the city. It was with the intervention of Merchant Ivory's unit that he was released from prison and allowed to complete shooting the film. There is a belief that he was made to sign an undertaking that he would desist from any kind of political theatre but in his book, Dutt denies any such development.

Utpal forays into Jatra, in an attempt to extend his reach beyond the urban elite. He wrote a Jatra called Rifle for New Arya Opera. His writing and approach to characterisation stemmed from a dialectical approach- which was to portray characters from different, often opposing perspectives, to finally arrive at the truth. Despite this complexity- or because of it- many of his plays were incredibly popular. Kallol, despite immense pressure from the powers that be, was accepted by common people with open arms.

Dutt's first Hindi film Bhuvan Shome was released. A collaboration with Mrinal Sen, the film portrayed him as a portly bureaucrat finding a distraction from his humdrum existence when he goes on a hunting trip and forges an unusual friendship with a tribal woman. By the time Bhuvan returns, he has (seemingly) transformed. While shooting, by way of a brief, Mrinal told Utpal about having an epiphany in a hotel room where he stood bare in front of the mirror and broke down. Utpal listened to the anecdote intently, excused himself for a bit and came back charged for the role of Bhuvan Shome. The film was a commercial success and ran to packed houses in several theatres.

In the same year, Utpal also featured in Khwaja Ahmad Abbas' Saat Hindustani.Saat Hindustani was set in Portuguese-occupied Goa, and portrays some rebels who participated in the Goa Liberation Movement. At the same time, it was a commentary on national integration and communal harmony. The director K.A. Abbas Anwar Ali, a Muslim, as a Hindu radical named Ram Bhagat Sharma, Amitabh Bachchan, a Hindu, as Anwar Ali, an Urdu poet from Bihar. Madhu, a Malayalam star, was cast as a Bengali, Abbas' assistant Madhukar from Meerut played a Tamilian and Utpal Dutt, a Bengali intellectual, was playing a Punjabi Army jawan. It was Utpal's first Hindi film. On a visit to Kolkata, K.A. Abbas saw the play Kallol which was about the naval mutiny of 1942, written and performed by Utpal Dutt. Dutt's bold portrayal of an admiral left a deep impression, which led Abbas to conceive of him as one of the seven. Utpal Dutt's proficiency in Urdu/ Punjabi stemmed from the time he spent as a child with Pathan Regiment of the army while his father was posted in Berhampore.

LTG (Little Theatre Group), which Dutt founded and helped build, folded up due to in-fighting and political differences. He founded a new troupe called People's Little Theatre (PLT)

His famous play Tiner Talowar came out, and became an immediate success. It was targeted by Congress, the ruling party,' and the performance was stopped.

Utpal appears in his first mainstream Hindi film, Guddi, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. It was also his first team-up with Hrishikesh Mukherjee, with whom he'd go on to form a successful collaboration which would include films like Gol Maal, Naram Garam and Rang Birangi. The film featured him as the congenial uncle of the hero, who is faced with a curious problem: that his girlfriend is in love with the film actor Dharmendra. Dutt's character attempts to demonstrate to her that films exist in a make-believe world.

Barricade, Utpal's play depicting the conflict between the Nazis and communists as a stand-in for the Congress-Communist feud, opened at Kala Mandir, Calcutta.

Notable films:
Calcutta 71, the second part of Mrinal Sen's Calcutta Trilogy, takes over from the first instalment, Interview (1971), in which an unemployed young man is being tried in a mock trial for undressing a suit-wearing mannequin in a shop as he couldn't procure a suit for his interview. Utpal Dutt plays the prosecuting lawyer, who represents the mannequin. The scene is a continuation from the previous film (the rest of Calcutta 71 depicts various stories from the turbulent life in Bengal of the 1970s, occasionally even incorporating stories from the Bengal famine of 1943), and is conducted in a farcical manner. Utpal plays the lawyer accordingly, his performance accentuating the farce.

A staging of Duswapner Nagari, a play about pre-Emergency political violence, was attacked by political goons. The performance had to be shelved due to the assault.

Notable film:
Jukti, Takko aar Goppo (Dir: Ritwik Ghatak)
Ritwik Ghatak's last film, also happens to be his most autobiographical work. The protagonist Nilkantha Bagchi is Ghatak's alter ego, serving to propagtate — and often, critique — his philosophy, worldview and political doctrine through the journey of the characters portrayed. Utpal plays a writer friend of Nilkantha, who has fallen out of favour with him for his commercial success and perceived compromises. Utpal Dutt and Ritwik Ghtak had been compatriots from their days of IPTA in the early 1950s.

Notable films:
Julie
Amanush
Chorus
Jana Aranya
Palanka

When Ray conceived The Middleman/ Jana Aranya, the nation was in the throes of The Emergency, enforced by Indira Gandhi's Congress government. The film, as Utpal Dutt later wrote, brought forth the “voice of Bengal” protesting the excesses of Emergency and the concomitant political and cultural degeneration. It depicted a corrupt education system, rampant unemployment and disintegration of morals among the youth. Expectedly, it was a stimulating experience for him to work with Ray, with Dutt avering that he couldn't even feel that the maestro was even directing, so unobtrusive was his style. Dutt plays a wily small time businessman and trader who tried to mentor the protagonist.

His next film, Do Anjaane (1976), was based on a Bengali novel, Dr. Nihar Ranjan Gupta's Raater Gaari, about an amnesiac man (Amitabh Bachchan) who discovers that his wife is now a popular actress in Bengali films and the man who tried to kill him is his manager. He sets out to exact revenge. Utpal Dutt plays Sukumar Sanyal, the director of her film who fumbles his Hindi and Urdu. It was his second collaboration with Amitabh Bachchan since Saat Hindustani and Bhuvan Shome. Dutt approaches the role with a touch of humour, foreshadowing his popular comedy avatars in Hrishikesh Mukherjee films like Gol Maal and Naram Garam later on.

Notable films:
Joy Baba Felunath
The Great Gambler
Gol Maal

Third directorial film, Jharh, was released.

In Joy Baba Felunath The Elephant God, Utpal Dutt played Maganlal Meghraj, a sort of arch-nemesis of Ray's sleuth character Feluda. Dutt cut a looming figure as the menacing Maganlal, possibly more menacing than any of the plethora of villain characters he played in the scores of commercial Hindi and Bengali movies. He reprised the role of Maganlal Meghraj in Kissa Kathmandu Ka, a TV film directed by Sandip Ray, Satyajit's son.

Notable films:
The Kingdom of Diamonds/ Hirak Rajar Deshe

Satyajit Ray's Hirak Rajar Deshe/ Kingdom of Diamonds happens to be one of his most political films. It was a follow-up to Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, Ray's adaptation of his grandfather's fantasy story about two bungling musicians faced with fantastical situations. Among the numerous alterations he made to the source material was a political undercurrent throughout the later half of the film. By the time he made plans for a sequel, the political landscape of the country had changed significantly. The Emergency had dug its claws deep into the Indian psyche. No artist stayed unaffected. Ray once said to Andrew Robinson, British journalist and biographer, “In a fantasy one can be forthright, but if you're dealing with contemporary characters, you can be articulate only up to a point because of censorship. You simply cannot attack the party in power.” But Hirak Rajar Deshe/ The Kingdom of Diamonds (1980) did just that. According to Utpal Dutt, The Kingdom of Diamonds was Ray's only out-and-out political film.

Utpal played the despot, the tyrannical king who wanted to control and shape the minds of his subjects. It was the third film in which Ray and Dutt collaborated, after The Middleman (1976) and Joy Baba Felunath/ The Elephant God (1979). Released three years after the Emergency, the film was a political statement in the guise of fairy tale, and ended up winning three National Awards that year. Terming Ray as a “rebel”, Utpal Dutt later referred to a particular scene in the film and said “when the people pull down the statue of the ruler bound in rope, the revolt against despotism finds a visuality that is universal”.

Notable films:
Naram Garam
Saheb (Bengali)
Chaalchitra
Fourth directorial film - Baisakhi Megh

Naram Garam (1981) was the second in a planned trilogy with director Hrishikesh Mukherjee and actors Utpal Dutt and Amol Palekar teaming up. The first was Gol Maal (1979), and in Naram Garam, though it wasn't technically a sequel, Amol and Utpal's characters had the same names as the previous film: Ram Prasad Sharma and Bhavani Shankar.

Notable films:
Hamari Bahu Alka
Shaukeen

Hamari Bahu Alka (1982) is a standard Basu Chatterjee offering — a middle class family drama. A dominating father gets his son married but refuses to give the young couple any space for them to enjoy conjugal bliss. Rakesh Roshan and Bindiya Goswami play the couple, while Utpal Dutt plays the father.

Notable films:
Rang Birangi
Pasand Apni Apni
Kisise na Kehna

Rang Birangi (1983) was the fifth collaboration of Utpal Dutt with Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Based on a story by the Hindi litterateur Kamleshwar, it was about rekindling the romance between a workaholic husband and the wife he had been neglecting. A friend decides to help, and hilarity ensues. Utpal's character, a police office named Dhurendra Bhatawdekar became one of his more popular comic roles, alongside Bhavani Shankar from Gol Maal.

Notable films:
Inquilaab
Laakhon ki Baat
Paar

Inquilaab (1984) had Utpal Dutt in an out-and-out villain role in a commercial Hindi action film. He plays a corrupt minister, rivalling Amitabh Bachchan's honest police officer who eventually enters politics to clean up the system.

Notable films:
Bhalobasha Bhalobasha
Saaheb (Hindi)

Notable films:
Kirayadar
Kissa Kathmandu Ka (TV)
Baat Ban Jaye

Kirayadar (1986) was another middle-class fable by director Basu Chatterjee. Utpal Dutt plays a house-owner who wants to vacate his flat but the tenants, a mother-daughter duo, refuse to comply. He then sends his son, who ends up falling in love with the daughter.

Notable play:
Janatar Aphim
The play highlighted Dutt's concerns about religion being made a political tool to distract the populace from real problems, foreshadowing the Babri Masjid incident and the ensuing riots that killed millions.

Notable films:
Agantuk
Nabab

Ray called upon Utpal Dutt to play his alter ego on-screen. Dutt was to play an uncle in absentia, who comes back to visit his married niece three decades after he had run away from home. The niece and her husband welcome him but there are questions about his identity. The role Dutt played in the film reflected Ray's worldview, and included his opinion about a plethora of subjects, right from philosophy and politics to science, technology, religion and civilization. In an awe-inspiring scene, Dutt indulges in a verbal duel with a friend of the niece's husband, "hired" to put the uncle to a test. Despite some of the most spectacular conversation scenes ever put on film, Agantuk never got the kind of acclaim and attention as most of Ray's earlier work. It was the last collaboration of Ray and Utpal, and remains a testament to their collective brilliance.

Notable films:
Padma Nadir Majhi is a poignant chronicle of the lives of fishermen whose livelihood revolves around the Padma river (now in Bangladesh), based on Manik Bandyopadhyay's seminal movel from 1936. Directed by Goutom Ghose, the film turned out to be Utpal Dutt's swansong. His role of Hosen Miyan, an influential but wily old man, earned him rave reviews..

Utpal Dutt passed away on August 19, 1993