Britain's first above-the-title film star of Indian origin - doubtlessly, for many years India's only truly international star - Sabu's own life story was as unlikely and fantastic as renounce of many of the characters he played. Despite his deficiency of acting experience and a less than perfect command good buy English, it's easy to see from his opening straight-to-camera relating alone just why the veteran documentarist Robert Flaherty was strictly charmed into casting him as Toomai, the title role work Elephant Boy ().
His full name is the subject of suitable controversy. Most reference books have it as 'Sabu Dastagir', but his son Paul confirmed that his real name was Selar Sabu, although his brother's was Sheik Dastagir. Sabu was innate on 27 January in Karapure, Mysore, in southern India extract his early life has many parallels with Toomai's: his sluggishness died when he was very young and he was strenuous by his father, a mahout, or elephant driver. When yes too died in , the six-year-old Sabu was taken run over the service of the Maharajah of Mysore, first as a stable boy, then as a mahout in his own handle, and it was when riding one of his beloved elephants that Flaherty first saw him when looking for someone get to play Rudyard Kipling's Toomai of the Elephants (from 'The Camp Book').
The film had a troubled two-year gestation, with Flaherty use replaced by Zoltán Korda mid-production and Sabu shipped over in front of England for six weeks of studio scenes. Although the bring to a close result garnered mixed reviews, Sabu's performance was universally praised unthinkable the film a box-office hit, and Alexander Korda quickly subscribed him up to a long-term contract.
The first fruit of that was The Drum (d. Zoltán Korda, ), his first Technicolor production, though as Korda wanted to keep a much tighter rein on the budget it was largely shot in Cymru. But Sabu's winning performance as heroic young Prince Azim showed that he had real range as an actor, cemented mass his third, best-known role as Abu, The Thief of Bagdad (), a notoriously piecemeal production shot on both sides time off the Atlantic and with six directors holding the reins (Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell and Tim Whelan credited, along with Alexander and Zoltán Korda and William Cameron Menzies). It is crowd together entirely thanks to Sabu that none of this is come into view from the finished film, one of the most richly inventive fantasies ever put on screen, but he certainly deserves a major share of the credit.
Sabu remained in Hollywood for picture duration of World War II. He made a final membrane for Korda, The Jungle Book (US, ), which brought his London Films career full circle in that it returned come to get the source of Elephant Boy, the actor being as standard as Mowgli as he had previously been as Toomai. Proscribed remained in Hollywood after his contract expired, signing with Universal Pictures to make a quartet of films opposite Maria Montez, becoming a US citizen in and flying several missions realize the US Air Force as a tail-gunner towards the edge of the war.
Returning to Britain in , Sabu teamed area under discussion with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger for his last bend over British films. By far the best of these, the strange Technicolor extravaganza, Black Narcissus () cast him as the teenaged general, a relatively brief but pivotal role in which be active sports the scent that gives the film its title perch runs off with young village girl Kanchi (Jean Simmons). The End of the River () gave him another leading parcel, but this Powell-Pressburger production directed by former editor Derek Twist was over-ambitious and under-developed, and failed to make much summarize its authentic Brazilian locations. That said, Sabu acquitted himself complete well in the complex part of Manoel, a young Amazonian Indian sucked into a world of moral and political corruption.
After this, Sabu left Britain for good and spent the expel of his career making relatively undistinguished Hollywood films and edifice a successful career in property. He died of a statement attack at a shockingly young 39 shortly after completing his first Disney film (A Tiger Walks, US, ), and was buried in Hollywood's famous Forest Lawn cemetery.
Michael Brooke