MUMBAI: Bengali film actor Soumitra Chatterjee will be honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke award on 3 May.

Confirming the news to Indiantelevison.com, Chatterjee said he is happy since the Dada Saheb Phalke Award has not been tainted by petty politics or biases. He said he had been reminded of his senior Satyajit Ray and Tapan Sinha, who have also been honoured in the past.

Ray had got the award for 1984 and Sinha for 2006.

Born on 19 January 1935, Chatterjee is known for his frequent collaborations with Satyajit Ray and his constant comparison with screen idol Uttam Kumar.

His centrality to Ray‘s work is akin to other key collaborations in the history of cinema - Mifune and Kurosawa, Mastroianni and Fellini, De Niro and Scorsese, DiCaprio and Scorsese, Max von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman and Jerzy Stuhr and Kielowski. He also worked with Sharmila Tagore in a number of Ray films.

Chatterjee also featured as Feluda/Pradosh Chandra Mitter, the famous private investigator from Calcutta in Ray‘s Feluda series of books, in two films in the 1970s Sonar Kella and Joy Baba Felunath.

Ghare Baire, an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore‘s novel of the same name and one of Ray‘s major ventures of the 1980s, featured Chatterjee in a leading role in the character of a radical revolutionary in a love triangle with his friend‘s wife. These roles showcased Chatterjee‘s versatility in playing diverse characters, especially in an urban setting.