Innocent was a matchbox factory owner, cement supplier, volleyball coach, actor, producer, president of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists, author and MP from Kerala. But by all accounts, he loved being an actor. Innocent Vareed Thekkethala’s career spanned five decades and over 750 movies. There’s not a Malayali he hasn’t made laugh.
Innocent was not the traditional brawny hero that directors are always happy to cast — he had a presence that made him unforgettable. The scene of his character, Kittuni, from the 1991 movie Kilukkam, winning the lottery masterfully shows Innocent’s ability to take the simplest dialogue and turn it into laugh-out-loud comedy. Leaning against a fence, Kittuni listens to Revathi’s character read out the winning numbers. Most of the scene is him repeating what she says in his signature Thrissur slang, but his inflexions and body language turn the scene into magic. “Adichu Mole (I won, dear),” he says, out of breath and falls to the ground in disbelief. That the simple phrase has found itself in the Malayalam Cinema Hall of Fame is a testament to his ability.
“Innocent’s dialogues really demand a semantic analysis to understand them. His delivery and rendering of these articulations with ease, has created a cult,” scriptwriter K S Manu said when the actor died on 26 March 2023.
An audience favourite, his roles in Ramji Rao Speaking (1989), Vietnam Colony (1992), and Manichitrathazhu (1993), to name just a few, made him an icon in the Malayalam film industry. But it was his off-screen personality that ensures Innocent will never be forgotten.
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‘A life of adjustment’
Innocent was never serious for too long — humour found a way into every facet of his life—be it his marriage, his time as president of AMMA, or even his three bouts of cancer.
“If you’ve decided you’ll die, no matter what disease you’ve been diagnosed with, then you’ll die. I had decided that it wasn’t time for me to go yet,” he said about his cancer diagnosis at the 2019 edition of the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters. He quickly followed it up with a Malayalam proverb: “God will make sure evil grows like palm trees.”
This self-deprecating humour was his signature. Perhaps this was born from what he calls “adjustment jeevitham” — a life of adjustment.
Born on 4 March 1948 in Irinjalakuda, Thrissur, Innocent was the fifth of eight children. By his own admission, school was not for him. After failing multiple times, he dropped out in Class VIII.
He considered himself the black sheep of the family — his siblings had all become doctors, engineers, and lawyers. “It was when my brother’s son, a doctor in the US with three clinics, came asking me to star in an ad for him that I felt that I had gotten somewhere,” he recalled in an interview with Mathrubhumi.
Even though Innocent tried his hand at multiple businesses, setting up shop everywhere, from Davangere to Mumbai to Delhi, his mind was always on cinema. As a young boy, he tried to run away to Chennai (then Madras) to try his hand at acting but was brought back home by a ticket collector, wrote his cousin CJ George in his blog.
Innocent eventually found his way and ventured into film production. He bagged his first role as an unnamed reporter in the 1972 film Nrithasala. By the early 1980s, he had produced two Kerala State Film Award-winning films and made his mark as the comedic relief in small roles.
Innocent’s first lead role in a big film was as Mannar Mathai in the 1989 film Ramji Rao Speaking. It generated what Onmanorama calls “Innocent mania” and solidified his position as a comedy king.
While many of his on-screen characters were bumbling, over-confident fools, in real life, Innocent was a confident man who knew his worth. It’s best illustrated by his interview with former Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Lonappan Nambadan, which aired on Doordarshan.
“Nambadan asked me if I felt honoured that he was interviewing him. I said, ‘Ennikk oru thengayum thonnunilla (I don’t feel a damn thing). Tamil Nadu CM Jayalalithaa has danced in front of me [in a movie scene]; your interview is not bigger than that’,” he said in 2019, recalling the incident.
Innocent often repeated his wife’s remark about how he’s not afraid of speaking his mind, be it in this case or as the president of AMMA for 18 years from 2000 to 2018: “Uneducated, stupid people have no fear.”
Best at everything he did
Innocent’s life didn’t slow down even when he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2012. In true Innocent fashion, he turned that experience into a best-selling memoir called Cancer Wardile Chiri (Laughter in the Cancer Ward).
In 2014, he was elected to Parliament from Chalakudy. That same year, his book about facing life’s battles with positivity was included in the Malayalam textbook for Class V students in Kerala’s state syllabus.
At the same time, he was under no illusion of the power of privilege. “Not everyone can face cancer while laughing like I did. They know they’ll have to sell their house or their land to afford treatment. They have to grapple with the fact that they’ll abandon their family with no support,” he said in an interview. He emphasised the role of the government in providing free treatment to those who cannot afford it.
His first speech in Parliament, delivered in Malayalam, was about the affordability of cancer care. And he wasn’t all talk, he set aside Rs 3 crore of the MP fund to bring cancer detection facilities such as mammograms to small towns in Kerala.
In his own words, he had to be the best at everything he did. In a 2019 interview, he said God came to him in a dream to bring him up to heaven. “I told him, you better be ready to lose your throne if you take me. He wordlessly left,” said Innocent.
Innocent died of complications from Covid-19. He must have decided it was time to claim the throne.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)