Dev Patel essays the role, alongside Jeremy Irons.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: The long-gestating biopic of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan is officially going into production next month, marking the end of eight years of labor to get the man’s story onto the screen.
The film – which will be titled The Man Who Knew Infinity, after what is considered the definitive biography of the math whiz – will star Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel as Ramanujan. Patel will act alongside Academy Award-winner Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune), who 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.
The film will begin production on August 3, reports Variety, at the Trinity College in Cambridge, UK. The film will be directed by Matthew Brown, who has also written the script, and will be produced by Edward R. Pressman and Animus Films in association with Xeitgeist and Marcys Holdings. A newcomer named Devika Bhise has also been cast in the film, and will play Ramanujan’s wife, Janakiammal.
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.
For Patel, the film is a chance to broaden his dramatic range after dabbling in mostly light-hearted work after the smashing success of Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight Academy Awards and garnered Patel a Screen Actors Guild award and a BAFTA nomination.
Irons, meanwhile, already has a stellar career to his name, and 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 set to replace Michael Caine as trusted butler Alfred in the new series of Batman films, due out in 2016.
The Man Who Knew Infinity will likely be released in late 2015, to compete for that year’s awards, but a firm release date has not yet been announced.
1 Comment
IT will be anohter hindu bashing opportunity for the West in the facade of critique of Ramanujam’s hindu view of travel etc…..a la slumdog millionaire…