We know all this detail because Hainlin and Rai's grandson, Peter Dietze, who lives in Melbourne, eventually – through family connections – was handed an archive, painstakingly maintained by Rani, of some 3000 Bombay Talkies documents, photos, film stills, letters, invitations and programmes.
Rani, who Rai had soon put in front of the cameras, became India's number one actress. Bombay Talkies started producing films with plots that challenged Indian mores like love between different castes. In the early 1930s, the now married Rai and Rani returned to India, to Bombay, establishing the studio with a splendidly Grecian-style pillared office. She had come to Europe to study dramatic arts and was soon designing costumes, watching masters of film like Fritz Lang and G.W. He was captivated by Rani, who was also from an illustrious Indian family her father was the surgeon-general of Madras. It didn't matter that at the time the pair had first met, Rai was already married to a German actress, Mary Hainlin, who had introduced him to German cinema in the first place.
In all of this, Rai, now moving to behind the camera, would be helped by the stunningly beautiful Devika Rani. That crucial move would eventually lead him to found Bombay Talkies in India, in 1934, the first "corporatised" Hindi film studio, which produced about 40 films and started the careers of, among many others, actor Ashok Kumar and actor and director Raj Kapoor. Having immersed himself in English theatre, Rai headed to 1920s Weimar Germany where film was flourishing at the UFA studio and at Emelka Film Company.
BOMBAY TALKIES HINDI MOVIE REVIEW ARCHIVE
Image courtesy of the Dietze Family Archive Devika was Himansu Rai's wife and an iconic Bollywood actress. Young Rai's own life would turn out to contain many of the same elements.ĭevika Rani and Ashok Kumar star in Vachan (The Promise), made in 1938.
Instead he headed into acting and the theatre world of the city's West End, his first step on a path that would help him pioneer that colourful feast of passion, melodrama, spectacle and music, Bollywood. Himansu Rai came from a family of eminent lawyers and it was his duty to study and practise at the London bar. In the early years of the 20th century, a young man from Calcutta landed in England, ready to continue his law work.