UNTIL the 1970s, the villain in a Bollywood film was generally a diminutive conspiring crook, who never stood any serious chance of prevailing over the glorious hero. That all changed when Amrish Puri entered the Bollywood scene. Emotions such as hate and anger were so clearly etched on his sharp-featured face, with its large, bulging eyes, that he really looked evil — and despite the singing and dancing that often surrounded his threats, his heavy and authoritative voice could send a genuine chill down the spine of his viewers.

Puri appeared in 221 films, from adventures to romantic comedies and melodramas, but he is perhaps best known to Western viewers for his role as the terrifying high priest Mola Ram in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). Smeared in ash, with a horned headpiece and a garland of human skulls, he ripped out hearts and pursued Harrison Ford’s square-jawed hero through a bewildering variety of perils. However, his relationship with the director was not a happy one, and despite being flooded with foreign offers, he refused thereafter to act in films where his role could be treated without consideration. A proud man, he hated to be taken lightly.

In Bollywood circles, his role as the terrorist leader Mugambo in Shekhar Kapoor’s Mr India (1987) gave the nation a catchphrase. As a militaristic Dr No clone plotting the total submission of India — a fate only forestalled by the antics of a mild-mannered hotel owner with an invisibility device and his band of cheery orphan children — Puri wickedly snarled out his repeated line “Mogambo khush hua” (“Mogambo is pleased”). So, shortly, did teenagers from Delhi to Kerala.

Puri was born in Navshera, a small town in Punjab, on June 22, 1932. His parents sent him to study in a hill resort, Shimla, and from there he travelled to Bombay to try his luck in Bollywood. His elder brother, Madan Puri, was already an established actor, and had a reputation for playing villains. Surprisingly, he was unable to help his little brother. In 1954 Puri was rejected in a screen test, with the producer saying that his face was “too harsh” to be shown as a Bollywood filmi-hero.

As talent counted little in the crazy and chaotic film world, Puri turned to theatre and worked with established directors such as Vijay Tendulkar and Badal Sarcar. After a struggle of almost two decades, in 1971 he landed a minor role in the critically acclaimed Reshma aur Shera. But Bollywood remained uninterested, so he turned to regional-language cinema.

By the mid-1970s, Bollywood seemed prepared to depart from its everlasting formula in which boy meets girl in the final scene despite numerous counterplots on the part of the villain. It was the director Shyam Benegal who cast Puri in Nishaart (1975) in the role of a powerful and unscrupulous village landlord prepared to go to any lengths to save a son accused of molesting a schoolmaster’s wife.

After this there was no turning back. In the next two Benegal films, Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977), he emerged as an actor with great potential. But mainstream commercial cinema remained oblivious to his talent until Hum Panch (1981), in which he played the role of a tyrannical, wealthy man who crushed all those who stood in his way. Amrish Puri had arrived as Bollywood’s villain-in-chief.

He took a small part in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi in 1982, but perhaps his biggest chance came the next year when Steven Spielberg, who is said to have seen stills of Puri playing an exorcist, invited him to play the role of Mola Ram in the Indiana Jones film. Puri’s pride, however, and his love of serious acting, meant that he chose mainly to devote himself to Indian cinema thereafter.

In Nagina (1986) he gave another mesmerising performance as a snake charmer. But he was by no means always to be found playing the bad guy. He also made a name for himself in the stock character of a family patriarch, outwardly tough and unyielding but inwardly sentimental and full of love for his children.

His excessive behaviour on screen was hardly visible in life. He was a moderate and disciplined man who kept his looks and physique virtually unchanged during a career spanning more than 30 years. Even in his seventies he continued to work until being admitted to hospital with blood clots in the brain.

Last year he acted in nine films, of which Hulchul, Mujhse Shaadi Karogi and Aitraaz were hugely successful. He had just completed Kisna, directed by the acclaimed Subhash Ghai, a film that millions of his admirers will be keenly awaiting as an opportunity to pay their last respects.

He is survived by his wife Urmila, and by a daughter and a son.

Amrish Puri, Bollywood actor, was born on June 22, 1932. He died of a brain haemorrhage on January 12, 2005, aged 72.