In a room where the air was thick with anticipation, he stood before Hollywood’s eyes and emerged a nervous wreck. “Gosh, I don’t know what happened in there,” he muttered. “I just lost it. I don’t think I’ll get it.”

Shanthini Venugopal wasn’t sure if she heard him right. “What do you mean you won’t get it? What happened?” she asked. Before she could make more of his gibber, she was called in herself. When she finished, the casting crew had an unusual request: “You’re good, but for you to be better, we need you to do it with him. Can we have you both together?”

What transpired next was a masterclass in improvisational brilliance and chemistry. 

Manogaran Maniam, the actor who thought he “lost” the chance to be in 1999’s Anna & The King with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun Fatt, cooked up on the spot a scene with Shanthini that overwhelmed their auditioners, promptly landing both roles as caregivers to Anna’s child.

It was a spontaneous magic that had happened countless times over the years between the two as they fought and made up like everyday couples in movie after movie, simulating a screen love that fed off the strength of their underlying platonic relationship. 

“There was never anything sexual between us,” Shanthini said, throwing her head back with a laugh, “although we have played husband and wife in at least four roles.” 

She attributes their chemistry to Mano: An actor who embraced his craft — be it on stage as Shakespeare’s King Lear or before the camera as Malaysian coffeeshop-sitcom’s Uncle Chan — with a passion so strong that the outcome was seldom wrong.

“He had the ability to do all the different genres of theatre and film; that’s how he got to be a Fulbrighter,” she said, referring to the US grant typically given to brilliant artistes who could mentor people outside their native communities. In the US, Mano also completed his master’s degree in Vermont, where he continued to engage with acting communities, landing himself a role with a play in New York.

“He loved what he was doing, so much that he left his 9-to-5 job to do it full-time,” added Shanthini of Mano, who went on to star in the Netflix serial on Marco Polo — the Venetian merchant, explorer and writer who took the Silk Road to travel through Asia in the 13th century.

Thus, it was a profound moment for Shanthini when she discovered Mano lifeless in his apartment in the predawn hours of May 31, 2025 — five months short of his 80th birthday.

She had to accept that her best friend of 43 years had left on his own terms. A friend who shared countless screen credits with her, lived in a block right across from her, had coffee or meals with her almost every other day or week and commiserated with her sorrows and giggled to her gossips.

No tears came off her, she said. None were necessary as she realized that Mano, being Mano, would have wanted no one saddened or burdened by him.

What he would have appreciated, she thought, was Tryambakam, the Hindu mantra of Shiva, which she chanted during their 20 minutes of solitude before the others arrived.

“I know his soul has left, but I just talked to my Mano. I told him ‘Mano, at least this way, you’re going the way you wanted.”

Prologue:

King Lear of Ipoh (Act 1, Scene 1) 

“Tell me, my daughters, / Which of you shall we say doth love us most? / That we may divest us both of rule, / Interest of territory, cares of state, / Which of you merits most our favour?” 

The knights of English stage — Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Ian Holm and Sir Ian McKellen — all regard King Lear the Everest of Shakespearean roles, given the character’s devolution from powerful king to madman raging on a heath before becoming a broken, weeping father.

The kaleidoscope of emotions, the psychological complexity of each cycle and the stamina required for the transitions made even the thespic titan Sir Laurence notoriously leave Lear for later — and still struggle with it when the moment came.

So, how did an Ipoh boy become Lear?

“Not every life begins in spotlight,” photographer, writer and cultural commentator SC Shekar explained of the Mano phenomenon. “Some start in the hush of school halls, a boy in Ipoh mouthing Shakespeare before he could fully grasp the weight of those words.” 

For readers outside Malaysia, Ipoh, a two-hour drive northwest of capital Kuala Lumpur, is one of the country’s most beloved cities — cherished for its rustic charm and heritage, which include colonial-era buildings, vibrant street art and perhaps, most famously, white coffee and bean sprout chicken.

But Ipoh sometimes finds itself the butt of jokes in local culture, particularly with the Ipoh mali phrase (pronounced ma-lee). The correct expression is Ipoh mari, which is Malay for “I’m from Ipoh”. The humor comes from a phonetic condition in some Mandarin and Cantonese speakers who render the “r” as “l”.

Mano, unsurprisingly, described himself as Ipoh mali.

Born November 13, 1945 — right after World War II — Mano grew up on Ipoh’s Lahat Road and was captivated by the sandiwara, or Malay folk theater, that ran at the night market by the Kinta River. He remembered plays featuring local warrior Hang Tuah, the ancient Malay sultanates and Ramayana — which tells the tale of Rama, an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu, and his wife Sita.

Mano also remembered something else: The cross-gender cast in some of those plays.

“I was four or five, and the older kids would lift me just high enough to see the feet of the transvestites performing. It just fired my imagination,” he told The Star newspaper in Malaysia in a September 2005 interview that writer Daryl Goh used for telling Mano’s obituary.

At Ipoh’s Anglo-Chinese School — a storied institution known by its acronym ACS — Mano’s lifelong love affair with the stage began. He discovered Shakespeare in 1960, when he was 15, with the character of the sea captain in Twelfth Night.

From that first voyage, his career set sail – charting a remarkable course through the worlds of theatre, film and education. From a student of the stage, he became an educator who returned to ACS to teach before morphing into an arts advocate and cultural anthropologist. 

In interviews over the years, Mano credited ACS and its theatre community for giving him a nurturing start. “I started out with Shakespeare, so I owe the Bard big time!” he told The Star in April 2016.

But he concurred with the difficulties in Shakespeare confessed to by some of the greatest English actors, that the world outside of theater often had no idea about. Mano spoke particularly of the delivery problem for non-native English speakers like himself.

“Nobody told me it would be so difficult. There are ways of doing Shakespeare well, and many ways of killing it. The iambic pentameter doesn’t come naturally to Asians, after all — the patois here is so varied.”

Still, Mano became a lion of the Malaysian stage who could devour any challenge, including Macbeth before the age of 18. Shekar, the photographer, writer and cultural commentator, observed that Mano had a way of savoring “the strange electricity of saying someone else’s sorrow” and owning it.

“He would go on to wear the crown of Macbeth, echo Lear’s madness and whisper Brutus’ betrayal into the hushed wings of forgotten theatres,” Shekar wrote, curiously noting that Mano never took on Hamlet. It was “the one role he left untouched, as if even he knew there had to be one mystery unsolved.”

Playwright and long-time Mano collaborator Kee Thuan Chye attests to the actor’s ownership of the characters assigned. Thuan Chye, who shares Mano’s self-deprecating humor, recalled his own adaption of Macbeth that Mano took heroic charge of despite the “mediocre directing”. 

He also remembers playing Jamie — the drunken and useless son of James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night — and learning “the finer points of acting” from Mano, who was cast as the elder Tyrone.

Two Mano characters are seared forever in Thuan Chye’s mind. One is King Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, where Mano’s regal presence overwhelmed, he says. The other is Big Brother in 1984 Here and Now — a Thuan Chye political satire loosely adapted from George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, 1984, where  Mano in the lead role struck a fine balance between the genial and sinister.

Bone-deep humility 

Mano’s aptitude for balance came from the evenness he struck in life by matching his greatness as an actor with bone-deep humility, said Thuan Chye.

“He was a consummate actor, an actor’s actor.” 

“I was shamefully brazen when I bluntly said one or two things to him during rehearsal when I directed him,” Thuan Chye said, remembering that Mano “never got defensive or retaliatory”.

Mano never flaunted his achievements and successes either. “He was ever humble. Despite his stature and reputation, he had no reservations about taking on small roles if asked. He might reminisce about some of his past acting roles but never to boast about them.”

Those virtues, Thuan Chye said, resulted from Mano’s many experiences – both good and bad — that built in him an innate empathy for actors trying to break into the industry and compassion for those determined to rise from poverty.

“He was generous in giving to his colleagues on stage, never attempting to outshine them,” Thuan Chye adds. “He played the role as it should be played and helped others to do the same with theirs.”

Shekar remembers Mano for that too, recalling a kindly old soul who “taught actors with silver hair to find their breath again at KLPAC” — the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center, which was home to much of Malaysia’s theater community.

Jo Kukathas, co-founder of the Instant Cafe Theatre which became a sensation in Malaysia in the 90s with its brand of “instant comedy”, recalls Mano being delightful as a middle-class, middle-aged Indian home-owner in Thor Kar Hoong’s Caught in the Middle staged in 1985.

“Trying to keep things together in a rapidly changing world, you shouted and shivered and roared like a mighty walrus. You were huge fun,” she wrote, recalling that there were at least four sequels with new actors eager each time to meet Mano who remained “warm and whimsical to all”. 

Grumpy men apart, she remembered Mano for playing teachers and gurus, and for an outstanding portrayal as a sage of “great beauty and gentleness” in The Island in Between in 2001.