Subir Banerjee

Subir Banerjee (born 1946 in Calcutta) is an Indian actor who played Apu in Satyajit Ray's Bengali film Pather Panchali, the first installment of The Apu Trilogy.

Pather Panchali During the pre-production of Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray advertised in newspapers seeking boys between five and seven years of age for the role of Apu.

Andrew Robinson, in his book Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, describes that at the beginning of the shooting of Pather Panchali in 1952, Subir Banerjee was a "decidedly unresponsive actor". The first scene that the crew shot was a scene involving Apu and his elder sister Durga, played by another young actor Uma Dasgupta, walking through a field of kash (Saccharum spontaneum) and catching a glimpse of a train. The scene required that Apu walk haltingly, looking for his sister, who had gone ahead. However, Banerjee, without any acting experience, could not enact the halting walk. So the crew had to improvise and place small obstacles in Banerjee's path; also some crew members hid in different parts of the kash field and called Banerjee at pre-arranged times so that Banerjee looks in those directions at times, thereby giving his walk a halting and searching appearance.

Later life Banerjee did not appear in any film after Pather Panchali. He disappeared from the public eye. India Today, a magazine, tracked him down and published his details in an article, "Pather Panchali: An Odyssey Revisited", in March 1980. Director Kaushik Ganguly won the award for best director for Apur Panchali in the 44th International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in November 2013. The director mentioned in an interview that he found similarities between certain parts of the life of Subir Banerjee and the iconic character Apu.