Here is a teaser for you. What is the common link between Bertrand Russell and Hema Malini? Each was in a film that had a gangly 16-year-old Naseeruddin Shah playing an extra.

In the Dreamgirl’s debut film Sapno Ka Saudagar, Shah is there in a blink-and-miss scene. “Only I can spot myself, and sometimes even I can’t,” laughs Shah, now 57. In Aman, a film about the atom bomb, philosopher Lord Bertrand Russell playing himself, encourages the London-educated idealistic doctor played by Rajendra Kumar. The young Naseer pops up in a crowd scene, standing right behind the good doctor’s dead body.

That was about 40 years ago.

Today we are backstage, at the famed Prithvi Theatre in western Mumbai. This is after all where Shah is celebrating 30 years of his play company Motley Productions. Outside, there is an arresting black and white poster of Shah in ruffles, every bit the thespian as King Creon in Antigone. Inside, an unsmiling worker bee guards the entrance against unwanted invasion much in the manner of a terrier trying to be a rottweiler, foiled however when Shah sweeps in with a nameless face in tow.

We pass a photographic recap of Motley’s journey on one wall. There is a very youthful Ratna Pathak Shah in an early staging of Dear Liar. The Shahs have been married now for over 25 years. We pass Heeba, Naseer’s daughter, on the stairs. The quiet and vastly underrated theatre and film actor and Motley co-founder Aakash Khurana stops by to have a word with Shah. Theatreana hangs in the air.

Life’s ironies are never far from an actor’s life. The week that begins Motley’s anniversary celebration also marks the death of one of the finest playwrights of the country, Vijay Tendulkar, who wrote the script for Nishant, Shah’s film debut. “I can’t say I was close to him but I admired him immensely. He was a very quiet observer,” says the actor.

Shah is not performing this evening. Instead, finding quiet in a small changing room, he effortlessly recreates scenes from his life so vividly that the past is flesh and blood once again, the bare room rich with imagery.

Friendly ghosts hover in the air. It is time to take a walk with one of them: Geoffrey Kendall, Shah’s hero. Kendall first mesmerised the young Naseer when he was a student in Nainital, where Kendall had taken his travelling troupe. The troupe, Shakespearana, included his wife Laura and daughter Jennifer, who would later marry actor Shashi Kapoor and set up Prithvi.

“Geoffrey Kendall was the greatest actor I had and have ever seen in my life. Added to that was the thrill of seeing him live. Out there I could touch him and smell him and that made me believe that acting was something that people do,” says Shah, the words almost whispered. Not that Shah aspired to theatre always. He wanted to be an actor: cinema or theatre, the domain was incidental. He hoped to be rich and famous, walk in the footsteps of a Paul Muni or Anthony Quinn and Spencer Tracy or the adored Kendall.

Shah’s memory goes back a long way. To the time when he was three and first saw a school play Mr Fixit, being performed at St Joseph’s. The young boy was mesmerised. Were these photographic images or were they real? Not much later, he would join his two older brothers in the same boarding school — for his father, a district collector, had a transferable job.

“I was not very attached to my parents. Neither could figure me out at all. And I think I disappointed them immensely,” says Shah. While he would draw closer to his mother in later years, his father would never be “privy” to his youngest son’s thoughts. Shah and his brothers (the eldest is currently a deputy chief of the army staff) were always close, spending winter vacations playing cricket.

An authoritarian father banned comics and Hindi movies, the only exception being Dilip Kumar’s films. “That is why my aspirations were never towards the Dilip Kumars and the Dev Anands of this world. I never idolised these people. I could see DK was a very fine actor, right from the beginning. It was pointed out to me. And after that I made it a point to run.” Shah’s eyes crinkle.

Then luck struck. He flunked his ninth class. Shah was enrolled in the less expensive St Ansalem’s at Ajmer, where his father was then posted. There, Shah took the initiative, formed a theatre group and did a close imitation of Kendall’s The Merchant of Venice. The results were dramatic. “Suddenly, there was approval. One afternoon on stage changed my life. I became a hero without doing anything, except for finding out what I was born to do. By sheer chance. And I have not looked back since. I was 14,” he recalls.

The highlight was when Kendall came calling there too. For the first and last time in his life, Shah asked for an autograph. “I still have it,” Shah says, his smile crumpling his face as if it were a muslin handkerchief. Shah and Kendall would one day work together. In Junoon, they had one scene: Shah shoots Kendall.

His days as an “extra” happened between school and college at the Aligarh Muslim University. Shah sneaked off to Mumbai and tapped a friend whose mother worked in films. His parents dragged him back home. “It’s a good thing they did for I don’t know where I would have ended up, as a production manager, bus driver or a pimp perhaps. Which was a very interesting acting lesson in itself,” says Shah.

Shah was to run away again. By then he had done Sparsh and Aakrosh back to back and a host of other films. “The awards were flying thick and fast. And commercial offers were coming in. So I just decided to take a break.” He landed in Poland, where Jerzy Grotowski ran the Poor Theatre and advocated a prop-less theatre. By the time Shah arrived, Grotowski had gone from direct interaction between actor and audience to where the actor was the audience. He was staying in the woods with his actors. “I lived in the forest with him. But I gained nothing. It was becoming very cultish and scary. I decided to get out,” says Shah, treating his current audience of one to spell-binding story telling.

He came back “thoroughly confused and went straight from Brotowski to Bhatt (Mahesh).” The laughter rustles once more. Working as Rosencratz in director Peter Brook’s international production of Hamlet was equally disappointing. “The vainest man I have met in my life,” Shah snorts.

Musing about egos and vanity, he allows himself the last laugh. From his 22 batch mates at Pune’s Film and Television Institute of India, the “strapping young men and beauteous women have all disappeared. Only two have survived: Shakti Kapoor and I. I was given the least chance of ever making it as an actor by everybody. To be mocked was nothing new. I had faced it since I was six. I became immune to it. Other actors’ egos are very fragile. I knew where I wanted to go, that nebulous thing called perfection. One may never get there but one must strive. That is why I am enjoying life so much and I am completely content with what I have,” Shah smiles, guru like.

Shah’s stage fascination continues but he is fed up with movies. He doubts if a great movie can ever be made in the country. “Ever,” he repeats. The last films he admired were the Munnabhai series. “Fabulous. They achieved the rare distinction of saying something serious using the popular form, like Guru Dutt had achieved. Most movies that have received great praise have been just okay,” he says. The only film he has accepted is produced by Vishal Bhardwaj and directed by his assistant Abhishek Choubey.

Shah’s upcoming films include Shoot on Sight and Wednesday. Explaining his choice of films, Shah says that it has to do with “either the money or that the film will be significant in some way.” In the recent Khuda Ke Liye, a Pakistani film that received critical appreciation for its handling of the debate within Islam, Shah is Maulana Wali, a religious scholar. “It’s just that one scene, (where the Maulana takes on fundamentalists who want to ban music) that made me do it. Shoaib Mansoor, the director, e-mailed me those two pages. I read that I was in tears. I said, f**k, I have to do this. It is the most important film in my career, for what it says,” he says.

Shah once heretically said of parallel cinema, which announced him to the world, that it was not ill, it was dead. “Nothing has changed. Without exception, all those who comprised new wave cinema in the 1970s are chasing stars and making song and dance spectaculars,” he glints. He has gone his own way, denying he is bitter. “I don’t think there is anyone who is as much at peace with himself as I am among the actors in Mumbai,” Shah says. Apart from a few actor friends like Om Puri, Paresh Rawal, Danny Denzongpa and Jackie Shroff, he would rather spend time with his family, which includes two sons he is close to. And, he says, he no longer throws viewers out of a performance when their cell phone rings. “I am milder now. A little gentler. I make them feel bad instead,” Shah smiles, dangerously.