Om Puri & Farida Jalal Movies Together List — 7 Films

The shape of the work

The 2000s account for 71% of everything they made together. The 1990s belonged to Khoobsurat; the 2010s to Chaar Din Ki Chandni. Om Puri acted in every film; Farida Jalal acted in all of them.

Partnership facts

• In Khoobsurat (1999), Om Puri played a grumpy father and Farida Jalal played his wife. The entire comedy of their scenes came from Puri's deadpan delivery and Jalal's rapid-fire, exasperated retorts — she set the pace, he played the straight man, and they never stepped on each other's lines.
• Om Puri and Farida Jalal were close friends off-screen long before they acted together. They had known each other since the 1970s from the theatre circuit in Delhi, and Puri often called Jalal 'the most underrated actress in the industry' in private conversations.
• Farida Jalal once said in an interview: 'Om and I never needed to rehearse. We'd just look at each other and know what the other was going to do. That's what happens when you've been friends for thirty years.'
• The director of Khoobsurat (1999), Sanjay Chhel, specifically cast Om Puri and Farida Jalal as a married couple because he had seen them share a single scene in a TV serial years earlier and thought 'they argue like a real couple — no one else does that.'
• Their pairing in Khoobsurat (1999) directly inspired the casting of Puri and Jalal as the bickering parents in the 2003 film Aapko Pehle Bhi Kahin Dekha Hai — the producer saw their chemistry in the earlier film and insisted they be brought back as a couple.