Roshan Taneja

Roshan Taneja (1931 - 10 May 2019) was a pioneer in teaching acting in India. He set up the acting department at the Film and Television Institute of India, and founded the Roshan Taneja School of Acting in Mumbai, India. He coached several actors from the Indian film industry. He also wrote and directed the Hindi film Abhi To Jee Lein.

Early life and career Taneja's family migrated from Kulachi, in the North Western Frontier Province (now in Pakistan) to Kanpur, India, where his father worked in a sugar mill. After the partition of India, his family settled in Lucknow, and he went to study at Delhi University. After graduating, he went to study acting in New York under a scholarship. He trained under director Sydney Pollack and Sandford Meisner at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theatre, and learned method acting.

He returned to India and set up the acting department at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Poona in 1963. He taught at the institute until 1975, conducting two-year acting courses, where the class included 10 male and 10 female students. By the late 60's, auditions for the course were happening at four centres - Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, where one thousand candidates were shortlisted for the final auditions in Bombay. and the short film Ode To Youth (1971).

He left FTII in 1975, and founded the Roshan Taneja School of Acting the following year. and he conducted one-year acting courses. The faculty included his former students from FTII - Mithun Chakraborty, Benjamin Gilani, Tom Alter, Om Puri, Kumar Gaurav, Sunny Deol, Sanjay Dutt, Govinda, Aamir Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Sunil Shetty, and Ajay Devgan.

In 2009, his students honoured him by celebrating 45 years of his teaching career. In 2017, FTII conducted an event "Guruvandana" in his honour.

Taneja also wrote and directed the 1977 film Abhi To Jee Lein, and narrated the 1969 documentary film The Awakener.

Personal life He was married to Mithika and has two sons Rohit and Rahul. In 2017, he released his autobiography Moments of Truth: My Life with Acting, at an event "Guruvandana" at FTII.