Counted among the finest filmmakers of the world, Satyajit Ray was one of the pioneers of Renaissance in Indian Cinema. The cultural icon in India and in Bengali communities worldwide, Satyajit Ray's influence has been widespread and deep in Bengali cinema; a number of Bengali directors, including Aparna Sen, Rituparno Ghosh and Gautam Ghose as well as Vishal Bhardwaj, Dibakar Banerjee, Shyam Benegal and Sujoy Ghosh from Hindi cinema in India, Tareq Masud and Tanvir Mokammel in Bangladesh, and Aneel Ahmad in England, have been influenced by his film craft. Across the spectrum, filmmakers such as Budhdhadeb Dasgupta, Mrinal Sen and Adoor Gopalakrishnan have acknowledged his seminal contribution to Indian cinema. Beyond India, filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese,Francis Ford Coppola, James Ivory,Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan, François Truffaut, Carlos Saura, Isao Takahata,Wes Anderson,Danny Boyle and many other noted filmmakers from all over the world have been influenced by his cinematic style, with many others such as Akira Kurosawa praising his work.
Satyajit Ray was born into an illustrious family in Calcutta in 1921. His grandfather, Upendra Kishore Ray-Chaudhary, was a publisher, musician and the creator of children’s literature in Bengali. His father, Sukumar Ray, was a noted satirist and India's first writer of nonsense rhymes, akin to the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. Sukumar Ray died when Satyajit was barely three, and the family survived on Suprabha Ray's meager income. Ray studied at Ballygunge Government High School, Calcutta, and completed his BA in economics at Presidency College, Calcutta. He went on to study at Visva-Barati University where he came to appreciate Oriental Art.
Satyajit Ray designed four typefaces for roman script named Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis, and Holiday Script, apart from numerous Bengali ones for the Sandesh magazine.Ray illustrated all his books and designed covers for them. Ray's artistic playing with the Bengali graphemes was also revealed in the cine posters and cine promo-brochures' covers. In his calligraphic technique there are deep impacts of: (a) Artistic pattern of European musical staff notation in the graphemic syntagms; (b) alpana ("ritual painting" mainly practiced by Bengali women at the time of religious festival; the term denotes 'to coat with'.
Ray created two popular fictional characters in Bengali children's literature—Feluda, a detective, and Professor Shonku, a scientist. The Feluda stories are narrated by Topesh Ranjan Mitra aka Topse, his teenage cousin, something of a Watson to Feluda's Holmes. The science fictions of Shonku are presented as a diary discovered after the scientist had mysteriously disappeared.He wrote a collection of humorous stories of Mullah Nasiruddin in Bengali. Ray penned his experiences during the period when he filmed the Apu Trilogy in his memoirs titled My Years with Apu: A Memoir.
Ray came to prominence with Pather Pachali, his first film which he shooted for close to two and a half years due to lack of resources. It brought him both a commercial and a tremendous critical success. This assured Ray the financial backing he needed to make the other two films of the trilogy: Aparajito (1956; The Unvanquished) and Apur Sansar (1959; The World of Apu).
Some of Ray’s finest films were based on novels or other works by Rabindranath Tagore, who was the principal creative influence on the director.Among such works, Charulata (1964; The Lonely Wife), a tragic love triangle set within a wealthy, Western-influenced Bengali family in 1879, is perhaps Ray’s most accomplished film. Teen Kanya (1961; “Three Daughters,” English-language title Two Daughters) is a varied trilogy of short films about women, while Ghare Baire (1984; The Home and the World) is a sombre study of Bengal’s first revolutionary movement, set in 1907–08 during the period of British rule.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Ray an Honorary Oscar in 1992 for Lifetime Achievement. It was one of his favourite actresses, Audrey Hepburn, who represented the Academy on that day in Calcutta. Ray, unable to attend the ceremony due to his illness, gave his acceptance speech to the Academy via live video feed from the hospital bed.