Born: 22 June 1950, Mussoorie
Died: 29 September 2017, Mumbai
Thomas Beach Alter was born on 22 June 1950. His grandparents migrated to India from Ohio, United States in November 1916, when they arrived in Madras (now Chennai) by ship. From there, they went by train to Lahore where they settled. His father was born in Sialkot, now in Pakistan. After the Partition of India, his family too split into two - his grandparents remained in Pakistan while his parents moved to India. After living in Allahabad, Jabalpur and Saharanpur, they finally settled in Rajpur, Uttar Pradesh, a small town located between Dehradun and Mussoorie (in present-day Uttarakhand) in 1954.
He studied at Woodstock School. It was while teaching at a school in Jagadhri, Haryana in the early 1970s that Alter picked up and honed his Hindi and fell in love with the movies, in specific Indian cinema. In that era television was not common in India and so most people went to the movies, often several times a week.
Alter was enamored by the films and in June 1972, after noticing a small classified ad in the newspaper, he enrolled at the prestigious Film and Television Institute of India of Pune. Alter was one of two people selected out of more than 1000 applicants that year and he learned his craft at the FTII, where he studied with the likes of Benjamin Gilani, Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Mithun Chakraborthy and others.
After graduating from FTII, Alter headed straight to Bombay and soon got his first break in the Dev-Anand starrer 'Sahib Bahadur' directed by Chetan Anand. His first release, however, was Ramanand Sagar's 'Charas' in which he played the superstar Dharmendra's CID boss. Steady work came to Alter throughout the 1970s and 80s and he worked with luminaries such as V Shantaram, Raj Kapoor, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Manmohan Desai, Manoj Kumar and Satjajit Rai as well as a host of lesser-known directors. He has also acted in regional cinema - Bengali, Assamese, Telegu, Tamil and Kumaoni films. Alter was witness to the coming of television to India and worked on the small screen in a number of popular serials, the biggest of which was the popular drama 'Junoon' which ran for five years. In it, he played the role of the mob lord Keshal Kalsi - KK, as he was famously known - and his performance earned rave reviews. During this same period Alter acted in the ensemble comedy 'Zabaan Sambhalke', another drama called 'Ghutan', and hosted the health-based talk show 'Mere Ghar Aana Zindagi'.
Some of his most famous movie roles have been as Musa in Vidhu Vinod Chopra's acclaimed crime drama 'Parinda', Mahesh Bhatt's blockbuster romance 'Aashiqui', and Ketan Mehta's 'Sardar', in which Alter essayed the role of Lord Mountbatten. Alter has also accumulated a body of theatrical work, the most recent having been in the theatrical reproduction of William Dalrymple's 'City of Djinns' and the solo play 'Maulana', based on Maulana Azad for which he has received much critical acclaim. He has also received praise for his role in the art film 'Ocean of An Old Man', which has been screened at film festivals around the world. Among several international assignments was the opportunity to work with Peter O'Toole in the Hollywood film 'One Night With The King'.
In 2008 was awarded the prestigious Padma Shree by the Indian government in recognition for his services to the field of arts and cinema.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0022758/bio
With his idol Rajesh Khanna and showman Raj Kapoor in Naukri (1978)
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