Features

Tony Ranasinghe,in full flow

Published

4 years ago

2022/09/16

Thilina Walpola

By Uditha Devapriya

This is the third and final in a series of candid vignettes about Tony Ranasinghe.

Pauline Kael once observed of Marlon Brando that his characters suggested tragic force. Comparable as he would have been to Brando, Gamini Fonseka never epitomised this kind of force: the closest he ever came to embodying it in Parasathumal, as the well-meaning but wayward nobleman who thinks he can do and get away with anything. In that sense Tony Ranasinghe was closer to Brando than he may have realised: the romantic heroes he played clamoured after women they could never have. This was same of the husbands he played too. Filled with jealousy, Ranasinghe’s characters never fulfilled their hopes. And yet they didn’t lack the looks: there was nothing in their appearance that debarred them from their lovers. Due to some issue or the other, however, they remained frustrated.

By the end of the 1970s he had changed completely. Having played the lover for a decade, he had now played the husband for another decade. His profile and outline had altered, considerably: his face had wizened, his frown had sharpened, and his figure, which had once suggested youth if not fragility, now suggested a father-figure. In Ahasin Polawata in 1979, opposite Vasanthi Chathurani, he had played the brother-in-law. Barely a year later he was playing her father in Ganga Addara. The latter role is significant because it marks a turning point in his career: he had evolved, and at a time when the two biggest stars of the screen, Vijaya and Gamini, did all they could to remain young, he had let go.

Even as the lover and husband, Ranasinghe’s characters could barely conceal their rage: in the morning after the accident in Delovak Athara, he shouts at his servant-boy for asking him for the family car. In Maya, he is gentle and pliable at first with the journalist who wants to know about his wife’s and daughter’s murders. The very next moment, he is raising his voice, and screaming at the reporter to get out. In Ganga Addara he is friendly enough with his poor nephew; when he finds out his affair with his daughter, he hollers at him to move away. The thread that runs through all these characters is their lack of refinement and polished elegance: if they feel intimidated, they lose all sense of decorum. They may look dapper and polite, but they are incapable of controlling their anger.

Curiously enough, however, he never found a home in the New Wave that swept across the local cinema in the 1970s. In Walmath wuwo he is out of place as an unemployed graduate, opposing Cyril Wickramage. Not unlike Gamini Fonseka, he never found a part for himself in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s films. Dharmasena Pathiraja’s world is full of outcasts and outsiders, and neither Fonseka nor Ranasinghe found their calling in such roles: that was left to Vijaya Kumaratunga, who epitomised the kind of freewheeling youthful idealism that Ranasinghe had long forsaken. When Ranasinghe did play prominent parts in the films of the new wave directors, it was later, in more cynical roles: as the corrupt inspector in Sisila Gini Gani, the cynical prosecutor in Anantha Rathriya, and the father in Salelu Warama.

In the 1980s Ranasinghe began writing screenplays. Tony was a literary man, a thespian: unlike Gamini Fonseka and Vijaya Kumaratunga, he spent his time in the theatre before entering the cinema. Some of the screenplays he worked on at this time suggest the themes he wanted to explore – many of them have to do with familial relations – and the source material he preferred. Most of these screenplays were adaptations of contemporary Sinhala literature: both Awaragira and Duwata Mawaka Misa, for instance, are based on novels by G. B. Senananayake. These adaptations are interesting if not intriguing because they suggest a deeply literary sensibility. Moreover, adaptations though they are, there is a consistent attempt in them to translate the plot in its entirety to the screen. That is why Awaragira, and Duwata Mawaka Misa, looks and feels long. It bears out what Lester Peries observed of Awaragira: that it could have worked better as a television serial than a film.

The point I am trying to make or imply here is that Ranasinghe’s attitude to adaptations of literary texts and plays reflected his notions about acting. His critique of Marlon Brando’s performance as Mark Antony was essentially that Brando went beyond what he saw as permissible limits: he didn’t act, he “mumbled.” This was his critique of Richard Burton too: “as an actor he stood out in a way few among his generation did,” he told me. “But in later years he collapsed and deteriorated, to a point where, like Brando, he lost all sense of discipline.” In other words, an actor’s talent depends on his fidelity to his craft, just as his performance depends on its fidelity to the source. This attitude colours his screenplays as well: long as they are, they are marked out by their fidelity to the original text. They are, for the lack of a better way of putting it, quite literary in their conception.

An often-underrated aspect to Ranasinghe’s career, as a screenwriter, was his penchant for comedy. Every other person I know here has watched or at least heard of Nonawarune Mahathwarune, but few among them know that Ranasinghe wrote the series. In his tribute to Ranasinghe after his death in 2015, Chandran Rutnam remembered an aborted project for a comedy they had worked on: it was to star Joe Abeywickrema and it would have been set during the Japanese raid on Sri Lanka in World War II. Curiously enough, however, he never played a comic role: his temperament was obviously much too cynical and hardened for him to do so. His looks suggested a man capable of great refinement, but also insatiable anger: a quality he made much use of in one of his finest performances, cast against type, as Dabare the gang leader in H. D. Premaratne’s Saptha Kanya – a role for which he bagged top honours from the Sarasaviya, Swarna Sanka, and OCIC Awards.

In Saptha Kanya Ranasinghe loosens himself so well that when we see Gamini Fonseka in Loku Duwa we are immediately reminded of this earlier performance. He never lets out his anger: he keeps it in, preferring to draw the protagonist into a cat-and-mouse game that the ending refuses to resolve. This was a performance the likes of which Ranasinghe never got again, just as Fonseka never got a role like the one he played in Loku Duwa again. In it he reaches out as far as he can, outside his zone, and does wonders. It goes without saying that like Fonseka’s mudalali, Dabare suggests Ranasinghe’s comic potential: something he had only lightly touched in his earlier incarnation as a lover and a husband. Never again was he to replicate this comic finesse: he ended up playing the wise but often flawed grandfatherly or fatherly figure in subsequent roles, right until his passing away.

Tony Ranasinghe’s career, for me at least, represents the peak of the Sinhalese cinema. A product of a middle-class suburban Catholic family, Ranasinghe emerged in the immediate aftermath of 1956 and Sinhala Only. An admirer of Arisen Ahubudu, he was, not unlike Henry Jayasena and even Gamini Fonseka, well-read and quite literary. His contribution to the Sinhala theatre has not been as appreciated as his work in the cinema, partly because while he made the waves as a member of Sugathapala de Silva’s acting troupe in his early years, his later career in the theatre was as a translator: he never achieved the status that the likes of Dharmasiri Bandaranayake did. Yet these figure in as the most definitive Sinhala translations of the Bard’s plays, faithful as they are to the spirit of the original.

Not surprisingly, it is his acting career that has garnered and continues to garner interest. As a performer he stood away and apart from the trends that made up his day and age: as he himself told me in our interview, he found Method Acting too intellectualised, and he point-blank rejected any notion of acting that emphasised a separation between the cinema and the theatre. For him, no actor could emerge in film without having gone through the stage. Whether or not one agreed with this perspective, it is clear that to the best of his abilities, Ranasinghe stood by the principle underlying it. As an actor, a dramatist, and a screenwriter, he valued fidelity to the source text and material above almost everything else. This was his aesthetic, one he adhered to right until his last days. One can say that the Sinhalese cinema profited much from his elan and his attitude. The Sinhalese theatre, too.

The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

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Features

Proactive peacemaking becomes a paramount need

Published

18 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wasting wars: Some war-displaced people in Lebanon. BBC

It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.

As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.

However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.

The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.

However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.

A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.

There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.

At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.

When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.

Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.

As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.

However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.

However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.

The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.

Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.

Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.

Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.

It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.

In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.

The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.

This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.

Features

Dialog Brings Sri Lanka’s Largest Digital Vesak Experience to Matara

Published

19 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

From left to right: Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, and Lasantha Theverapperuma experience the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered VR tours.

Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.

One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.

Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.

Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.

Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.

Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha

Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”

Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”

Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.

Features

Beauty, elegance and talent…for women

Published

19 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.

According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.

Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.

With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.

The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026

A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.

Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.

The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.

Launching the first round of auditions

The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.