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Indubala Singh's introduction to Farooq Sheikh:
Farooq Sahib actually needs no introduction, nor do I think he is an artist in 'Search of an Audience' because, it is the audience which actually seeks him out. Farooq Sahib is a man of abundant aptitude, an intellectual, and above all a man of great personal charm without any hypocrisy or any sort of self-deception. He is in fact a trained lawyer but never followed the profession. He was born to a lawyer father and mother in a village in Baroda district , Gujrat which to this day he visits and takes care of his lands there. He had his schooling in St Mary's and went to St Xavier's College after which he joined Siddharth College of Law, Bombay -- mainly because attendance wasn't compulsory there and he could rehearse and act in the IPTA plays. In fact he is a gift of IPTA to Indian Cinema and he entered the film world as a committed artist in 1973 in Garam Hawa, directed by MS Sathyu, senior director of IPTA. In the film he enacted the role of Sikander. Based on theme of the partition of India, the unsentimental directness of the film was remarkable. It was highly acclaimed and also screened at the Cannes film festival. It ran into trouble with the Indian censors but neverthless was awarded the National award for National Integration in 1973.
Farooq Sahib had no intention of being a professional actor but after the film's acclaim he was noticed by Satyajit Ray who called him up and offered him the role of Aqueel in Shatranj ke Khiladi in 1977 and in 1979 Muzaffar Ali offered him a lead role in Gaman of a migrant from UP who becomes a taxi driver in Bombay. After that in 1979 itself, came his first commercial hit -- Noorie against our own Chandigrh beauty, Poonam Dhillon. Even though the film was a huge success , he was embarassed as he felt he was not cut out for song, dance, and fight kind of sequences. After that he did not do any film for two years but in 1981 Sai Paranjpaye called him to read the script of Chasme Budoor,a romantic comedy. He enacted the lovable Siddharth Parashar. In 1992 he did a naughty mishievous Hare Bashudev in Hare -Tortoise story. Sai had great fondness for weaving humorous fables and both of the films constitute two of the best comedies of Hindi cinema.
In I981 Farooq Sahib did Umrao Jaan with Muzaffar Ali again and the film turned out to be a memorable one not only for its excellent adaptation of Mirza Hadi Rusva's novel in Urdu by the same name but also for its art direction and outstanding performances of Rekha and Farooq Sahib. Interestingly the rendition of the beautiful song 'In aankhon ki masti' which is picturised on both of them had extremely sensitive close ups of Farooq Sahib accentuating his poetic eyes. In fact Naseerud din Shah, who was one of the characters, conceded that it was Farooq Sahib who brought the real senstivity to his role of all the male leads in the film.
In 1982 Farooq Sahib portrayed another sensitive character of Sarju in Saagar Sarhadi's film Bazaar. There after he did a classical comedy with Hrishikesh Mukherji as Prof Jeet Saxena in Rang Birangi. In fact he learnt a lot from Hrishida and decided to do less films and moved on to Television as it was opening up contentwise. He enjoyed doing Shrikant for 2 years on TV and after that became the ribbling host of Jeena isi ka naam hai which was a huge success as he looked into the lives of achievers without a definite script.
Another land mark was the play Tumhari Amrita he did with Shabana Azmi which was adapted from A.G. Varney's Love Letters and directed very ably by Firoze Khan. The play was planned as an experimental show for Jennifer Kapoor Festival in Feb1992 and it to have 4-5 shows but it had more than 250 shows and was staged almost all over the world except Australia.Recently Farooq Sahib was seen in Saas Bahu and Sensex.
Farooq Sahib has been rather a cinematic epitome of the common man and the buoyant boy nextdoor. With his near-natural acting he enriched every role he essayed with sincerity and conviction, revealing the full range of his versatile acting talent in almost all the genres.
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