It would have been easy to view the actor Saeed Jaffrey, who has died aged 86, as a playboy and bon vivant. Loquacious, irrepressible and mildly raffish, he recounted his peccadilloes in his autobiography, Saaed: An Actor’s Journey (1998), with rueful charm. But a track record that includes more than 180 film and television roles – including in Gandhi, My Beautiful Laundrette, A Passage to India and The Jewel in the Crown – and almost as many on radio, is not the mark of a dilettante. The image of a rouÉ concealed a man who was conservative, courteous and old-fashioned in his values as well as deeply connected to his Shia Muslim roots.

Son of Hamid and Hadia Joffrey, he was born in Malerkotla, Punjab, and spent his childhood moving around north India, where his father, a doctor, worked in public health. Saeed was bright and his parents hoped he would join the civil service after he left Allahabad University. He had other ideas, but dutifully applied for a compromise – teaching English at an upmarket boarding school. With parental permission, he went to spend a few months in Delhi before taking up the post. The train journey there changed his life and put paid to his teaching career.

He met students on the train who invited him to their favourite coffee house, a watering hole for local literati. There, he heard that All India Radio was looking for English-speaking announcers. He applied, was accepted and in no time, was also writing stories, monologues and plays – one had a cast of 35 characters, all of whom, he recalled with pride, he played himself. Amateur productions at the new Unity theatre gave him starring roles and glowing reviews, leading in 1956 to a Fulbright scholarship to study drama in the US.

 

He was joined there by Madhur Bahadur, whom he had known at Unity and had been assiduously courting (“but she steadfastly held on to her virginity,” he mourned). They threw themselves into New York life, working with the Actors Studio and picking up whatever parts they could – among these for Jaffrey was the role of Professor Godbole in the 1962 Broadway production of A Passage to India. The couple married in 1958 and had three daughters, but Jaffrey’s inability to resist other women or alcohol finally led to his retreat to London, broke and with scant prospects, and to their divorce. Madhur would go on to establish herself as a food writer, popularising Indian cuisine in the west.

When Jaffrey arrived in Britain, non-white actors were still a rarity and the theatre world was at a loss as to how to deal with them. Slowly his quality became recognised, even though the stage parts he was offered often depended on his ethnicity rather than his considerable professional abilities. It is not surprising that much of Jaffrey’s early UK work was in the BBC World Service, where his splendid speaking voice and his pure Urdu were invaluable.

Saeed Jaffrey with Shirley Anne Field in My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985. Photograph: BFI

On television he would give impressive performances in the series Gangsters (1976-78) and Tandoori Nights (1985-87). But the turning point came through film. Cast in The Wilby Conspiracy (1975), he became firm friends with Michael Caine, who suggested that John Huston cast him in The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Landing the part of Billy Fish, in the film starring Sean Connery and Caine, made Jaffrey instantly recognisable and bankable. Not long afterwards, he met and in 1980 married Jennifer Sorrell, who left the BBC, where she worked, to become a casting agent, and stabilised both Jaffrey’s emotional and professional life.

Other major roles followed – he was the indolent Muslim aristocrat Mir Ali in Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players (1977), Sardar Patel in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) and Nasser Ali in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, which gained him a Bafta nomination) – and in 1984 Jaffrey appeared in a trio of high-profile productions examining Britain’s relation to India: the TV mini-series The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown, and the film A Passage to India.


Jaffrey, right, with Dennis Waterman in an episode of Minder from 1979.

Bollywood belatedly discovered him and drew him into a world where actors shoot a number of films simultaneously. Jaffrey raced between studios, changing costumes in a limousine and reading the script for the next scene along the way. Acting styles – Indian and western – did not fit, and he had to develop his natural ability to absorb a role quickly. Even with such a schedule (on one occasion he started at 4am and shot five films), he did not busk it. For one of his earliest Bollywood films, Chashme Buddoor (1981), he spent time with a paan-seller in preparation for the role he was to play, and that meticulousness continued to be part of his approach to acting.

In later years, though frail, he continued to broadcast, where his feeling for Urdu poetry provided yet another facet of this engaging and contradictory man. In 1997 his adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy was produced on the World Service, with Jaffrey playing all 86 characters. He had a stint on Coronation Street in 1999 as Ravi Desai, who ran the corner shop, and took his last film role, in Everywhere and Nowhere, in 2011. He was appointed OBE in 1995.

He is survived by Jennifer and by the three daughters, Zia, Meera and Sakina, of his first marriage.

• Saeed Jaffrey, actor, born 8 January 1929; died 14 November 2015