Biopic on math genius Ramanujan creates an early buzz.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: The Dev Patel-fronted biopic of legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan has added a formidable actor to its cast: Academy Award-winner Jeremy Irons.
Irons will essay the role of G.H. Hardy, the Englishman who discovered Ramanujan’s raw talent for numbers and brought him to Cambridge University, where he flourished. Hardy ultimately became something of a mentor for Ramanujan, and later called his discovery of Ramanujan his greatest contribution to the field of mathematics.
The film is entitled “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” named after the 1991 biography of Ramanujan written by Robert Kanigel. The film is written and directed by Matthew Brown, who also wrote the in-production biopic of James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
Born in Tamil Nadu in 1887, Ramanujan was a bona fide math prodigy by the time he was a teenager, and earned himself a scholarship to the Government College at Kumbakonam. At Cambridge, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. One of his most renowned mathematical works is the Ramanujan-Petersson Conjecture, a highly complex equation that was not formally proven until 1973, decades after Ramanujan died.
He passed away in 1920, at the age of 32, due to illness, likely an infection of the liver.
Ramanujan will be played by Dev Patel, the young actor who shot to fame in 2008 for his portrayal of lead character Jamal Malik in Slumdog Millionaire. The film took audiences and critics around the world by storm, grossing over $377 million off a budget of just $15 million, and winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Irons is perhaps best known to audiences as the voice behind the villainous Scar in 1994’s The Lion King. He also played the villain in 1995’s Die Hard With a Vengeance, and is most recently known for his role in the TV show “The Borgias.” He won the Academy Award for Best Actor of 1990 for his role in Reversal of Fortune, in which he played real-life murder suspect Klaus von Bulow. One of the producers on that film, Edward R. Pressman, is also a producer on the Ramanujan biopic.
With casting underway, the Ramanujan film should expect to go before cameras next year. There is no word on a release date yet.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com