24 Facts About Ardeshir Irani

Khan Bahadur Ardeshir Irani was a writer, director, producer, actor, film distributor, film showman and cinematographer in the silent and sound eras of early Indian cinema.

Ardeshir Irani is considered one of the greatest personalities in recent Indian Cinema.

Ardeshir Irani was the director of India's first sound film Alam Ara.

Ardeshir Irani was the producer of India's first colour film Kisan Kanya.

Ardeshir Irani was renowned for making films in Hindi, Telugu, English, German, Indonesian, Persian, Urdu and Tamil.

Ardeshir Irani was a successful entrepreneur who owned film theatres, a gramophone agency, and a car agency.

Ardeshir Irani was born into a Parsi Zoroastrian family on 5 December 1886 in Pune, Bombay Presidency.

In 1905, Irani became the Indian representative of Universal Studios and he ran Alexander Cinema in Bombay with Abdulally Esoofally for over forty years.

In 1917, Ardeshir Irani entered the field of film production and produced his first silent feature film, Nala Damayanti, which was released in 1920.

In 1922, Ardeshir Irani joined Bhogilal Dave, the former manager of Dadasaheb Phalke's Hindustan Films, and established Star Films.

Dave, a graduate of the New York School of Photography, shot the films while Ardeshir Irani directed and produced them.

At this establishment, Ardeshir Irani produced the films and either Mishra or Gandhi directed the films.

Ardeshir Irani improved on it, using new talent to great effect.

In 1925, Ardeshir Irani founded Imperial Films, where he made sixty-two films.

Ardeshir Irani became the father of talkie films with the release of his sound feature film, Alam Ara on 14 March 1931.

Ardeshir Irani is credited with making the first Indian English feature film, Noor Jahan.

Ardeshir Irani completed his hat-trick of earning fame when he made the first colour feature film of India, Kisan Kanya.

Ardeshir Irani gave a new courageous outlook to filmmaking in India and provided such a wide range of choice for stories in films that till date, there are films being made which have a theme relating to one of the one hundred fifty-eight films made by Irani.

In 1933, Ardeshir Irani produced and directed the first Persian talkie, Dokhtar-e-Lor.

Ardeshir Irani produced Kalidas in Telugu and Tamil, as a bilingual talkie, on the sets of Alam Ara, with songs and major casting in Telugu.

Also, Ardeshir Irani visited London, England for fifteen days to study sound recording and recorded the sounds of Alam Ara on the basis of this knowledge.

Ardeshir Irani made one hundred fifty-eight films in a long and illustrious career of twenty-five years, between the First and Second World Wars.

Ardeshir Irani was not compelled to live like Dadasaheb Phalke for he realised that the war was a time not suitable for the film business and therefore he suspended his film business during that time.

Ardeshir Irani died on 14 October 1969 at the age of eighty-two, in Mumbai, Maharashtra.