Rip Bollywood Actor Tom Alter Dies

Rip Bollywood Actor Tom Alter Dies

Bollywood Actor Tom Alter died on Friday after losing his battle against stage four skin cancer in Mumbai.
He was 67-year-old.

He is survived by his wife Carol, son Jamie and daughter Afshaan.

According to a statement released by his family, the actor died on Friday night.

“It is with sadness we announce the death of Tom Alter, actor, writer, director, Padma Shri, and our dear husband and father. Tom passed away Friday night at home with his family and close family members in attendance. We ask for their privacy to be respected at this time,” the statement read.

Last year, Tom Alter had amputated his thumb due to the condition.

In short Biography of Actor Tom Alter –
Name - Thomas Beach Alter
Born - 22 June 1950, Mussoorie, Uttar Pradesh, India (now in Uttarakhand)
Died - 29 September 2017 (aged 67) Mumbai, India
Occupation - Actor
Years active - 1976–2017
Spouse(s) - Carol Evans (m. 1977)
Children – 2

Tom Alter is the son of American Christian missionaries of English and Scottish ancestry and has lived for years in Mumbai and the Himalayan hill station of Landour.
His grandparents migrated to India from Ohio, United States in November 1916, when they arrived in Madras (now Chennai).
From there, they went to Lahore by train, where they settled. His father was born in Sialkot, now in Pakistan.

After the Partition of British India, his family too split into two; his grandparents remained in Pakistan while his parents moved to India.
After living in Allahabad, Jabalpur and Saharanpur, they finally settled in Rajpur,
His elder sister, Martha Chen, has a PhD in South Asian Studies from University of Pennsylvania and teaches at Harvard University. His brother John is a poet and a teacher.

He was educated in Mussoorie's Woodstock School. His father taught history and English at the Christian college (E.C.C), Allahabad, and thereafter taught at a seminary in Saharanpur.

In 1954, his parents started an ashram in Rajpur, called "Massihi Dhyaan Kendra" and they settled there. People of all religions came there for studies and discussions. They would initially recite biblical studies in Urdu and subsequently in Hindi (when Hindi was adopted in 1962).

At 18, Alter left for the US for higher education and studied at Yale for a year.

At the age of 19, Alter obtained work as a teacher, at St. Thomas School, Jagadhri, in Haryana. He worked here for six months.
Over the next two and a half years, alter worked several jobs, teaching for a while at Woodstock School, Mussoorie, and working at a hospital in the US, and returning to India before continuing to work at Jagadhri. At Jagadhri, he began to watch Hindi films.

1972-74
Tom joined Film and Television Institute of India in Pune where studied acting from 1972 to 1974 under Roshan Taneja

He worked in many Hindi movies, Hindi television serials.