Nana Patekar Won Three National Film Awards, Directed Prahaar and Co-Founded the Naam Foundation for Drought-Hit Farmers in Maharashtra

Nana Patekar won three National Film Awards, directed one film, Prahaar, and in 2015 co-founded a relief foundation for drought-hit farmers in Maharashtra. He died on Thursday 8 October 2026 at his home in Dona Paula, Goa, aged 75, after a heart attack.

A poster painter at 13

He was born Vishwanath Patekar on 1 January 1951 in Murud-Janjira, in what is now Raigad district of Maharashtra, according to Deccan Chronicle’s profile. The Press Information Bureau’s 2013 Padma list gives his full name as Vishwanath Dinkar Patekar, alias Nana Patekar.

Deccan Chronicle writes that his father worked in a mill and the family moved to Mumbai. At 13 he took a job painting film posters for 35 rupees a month and one meal a night. He later studied at the J.J. School of Art and worked in an advertising agency. He began acting in Marathi plays in the early 1970s, and the same profile names Hamidabaichi Kothi and Purush among his stage work.

His first film was Gaman (1978), directed by Muzaffar Ali.

Parinda, Krantiveer and Agni Sakshi

The National Film Awards came for three roles in seven years. Gulf News lists them: Best Supporting Actor for Anna, the underworld boss in Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Parinda (1989); Best Actor for Pratap Narayan Tilak in Mehul Kumar’s Krantiveer (1994); and Best Supporting Actor for Vishwanath, the controlling husband in Partho Ghosh’s Agni Sakshi (1996). Lists differ on whether they give the film’s year or the year the award was presented, so the same win appears under 1989 or 1990 for Parinda, and likewise a year apart for the other two.

Parinda also earned him the Filmfare award for Best Supporting Actor and was India’s entry for the 1990 Academy Awards foreign-language category, without being nominated, Gulf News adds. By the same account Krantiveer earned the Filmfare Best Actor award and was the third-highest-grossing Hindi film of 1994, and its anti-corruption monologues became widely known.

The rest of the run, as Gulf News’s obituary records it, includes the comic gangster Uday Shetty in Welcome (2007), the encounter specialist Sadhu Agashe in Ab Tak Chhappan, and Joseph Braganza, a deaf father, in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Khamoshi: The Musical. The same paper’s piece on his National Award roles adds two Filmfare Best Villain awards, for Angaar (1992) and Apaharan (2005). Deccan Chronicle names O’ Romeo (February 2026) and the web series Sankalp (2026) among his recent work.

Patekar received the Padma Shri in 2013. PIB’s release of 25 January 2013 lists him under Art, from Maharashtra, among 80 Padma Shri awards in a list of 108 Padma honours that year.

Prahaar and three years with the Maratha Light Infantry

Prahaar: The Final Attack (1991) was the only film Patekar directed, ThePrint reports. He also played the lead, Major V.S. Chavan, and the story follows a new trainee in the Maratha Light Infantry Regiment, played by Gautam Joglekar. ThePrint says Patekar joined the Territorial Army, the part-time reserve of the Indian Army, and trained with the regiment in Belagavi before shooting.

He gave the length of that training himself. In an interview ThePrint quotes, he said a civilian is commissioned in six months and he had already trained for three years.

The army link continued in 1999. Speaking on Kaun Banega Crorepati, hosted by Amitabh Bachchan, in 2024, Patekar said senior officers told him only the Defence Minister, George Fernandes, could approve a civilian joining the troops, and that Fernandes, by his account, asked when he wanted to leave. The Week reports his account of about 60 days with soldiers near the Line of Control, in Dras, Leh, Kupwara, Baramulla and Sopore, and six days at a military hospital in Srinagar. He said his weight fell from 76 kg to 56 kg. The war itself is told in tuput’s account of the Kargil fighting above 16,000 feet.

Natsamrat and the Marathi films

Patekar kept returning to Marathi. In Natsamrat (2016), directed by Mahesh Manjrekar and based on V.V. Shirwadkar’s (Kusumagraj’s) Marathi play, he played Ganpat Belwalkar, an ageing stage actor. Gulf News records a Filmfare Marathi Best Actor award in 2017 for the role. Koimoi, a film-trade site, reports an India gross of Rs 39 crore against a budget of about Rs 7 crore, which it says put the film among the five highest-grossing Marathi releases.

The Naam Foundation

In September 2015, in the middle of a severe drought, Patekar and the Marathi actor Makarand Anaspure set up the Naam Foundation. ETV Bharat says the name joins the first letters of their names, Na and M. Business Today reports that Patekar dropped plans to buy a car worth about Rs 1.5 crore and gave the money to the families of farmers who had died by suicide in Marathwada and Vidarbha. It says the first payments were cheques of Rs 15,000 to Rs 25,000 to widows and bereaved relatives.

The foundation then moved to water. On 2 October 2015 the two founders went to Dhondal village in Vaijapur tehsil, in the district now called Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. ETV Bharat reports that the village had about 11 check dams that held little water because of silt, that silt was cleared along 4.5 km in six months, and that the village has not needed water tankers for the last decade.

An early Gulf News report on the river work quotes a volunteer supervisor, Rajabhau Shelkhe. He said the team had dug out 550 km of rivers and water bodies using machines, including 110 km of river bed in Beed district, and that a contractor, Keshavrao Aghav, had lent 20 excavators free of cost.

Business Today lists the foundation’s work to date as disaster relief to 50,908 families, help for 4,957 widows and financial aid to the families of 102 soldiers killed in service. These are the figures as Business Today reports them, and tuput has not seen an audited statement.

The 2018 complaint and how it ended

In October 2018, the actress Tanushree Dutta filed a police complaint over an incident she said took place on 23 March 2008 during the shooting of a song for the film Horn Ok Pleassss. Patekar denied it, NBC News reports. Mumbai police filed a closure report in 2019, citing insufficient evidence. Dutta disputed that, and filed a protest petition in December 2019.

On 7 March 2025 Judicial Magistrate First Class N.V. Bansal of the Railway Court in Andheri accepted the closure report, holding that the complaint was time-barred. LawChakra quotes the order as saying the first incident “cannot be said to be false, nor can it be said to be true.” The court made no finding on the facts.

The death and the state funeral

The Week reports that Patekar was brought dead to Manipal Hospital, and that he had messaged a friend at about 2.30 am on 8 October about severe chest pain. Medical staff gave CPR for about 45 minutes. Reports give the time of death as 5.10 am (Outlook, citing Dr Shekhar Salkar of Manipal Hospital) and 5.20 am (The Week). The first reports, which NBC News carried from the Associated Press citing PTI, described a suspected cardiac arrest.

Police registered an unnatural death case under Section 194 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. The Week reports police describing this as standard procedure, to be closed if the findings confirmed natural causes. A post-mortem was done at Goa Medical College, Bambolim, and a senior doctor there told PTI the cause was acute myocardial infarction due to left main coronary artery thrombosis, with atherosclerotic coronary artery disease, which the report classes as natural. Outlook published that account on 12 October 2026.

Cultural Affairs Minister Ashish Shelar announced on 8 October that the Maharashtra government would give Patekar state honours, citing his work in Marathi theatre and in Marathi and Hindi cinema, according to Onmanorama. His remains reached Pune airport and were cremated that night at his farmhouse in Donje. News On AIR reports a guard of honour before the cremation, which his son Malhar performed, and says Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy Chief Ministers Eknath Shinde and Sunetra Pawar paid their respects after the remains arrived at the airport.

Another film figure, Manoj Kumar, was cremated with state honours in April 2025, and tuput’s account of his films and funeral has the details.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s post, published on the Prime Minister’s Office website, said few actors had Patekar’s “intensity, individuality and unmistakable presence”. It added that his contribution to Hindi and Marathi cinema was immense.