“There was something of The Arabian Nights about Lilamani’s enchanting and exotic life, one through which this latterday Scheherazade seemed to float with her feet barely touching the ground. Cosseted from birth by wealth, blessed with talent as a dancer, surrounded by famous friends, she remained nonetheless the embodiment of unaffected simplicity.”
– Obituary of Lilamani Kapoor née Rajasooriya

Having recently written about Englishwoman Florence Farr, the pioneering Edwardian actress with comrades such as WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Ezra Pound, who travelled east to Ceylon to become a school principal, I decided someone with similar attributes but opposite switch of locations and differing ethnicity should be my new subject. So here’s the story of a Sri Lankan, a leading exponent of Bharata Natyam, who travelled west to Italy and England, befriending Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Steve McQueen and even Princess Margaret along the way.

It’s exhilarating when you bump into an intriguing character while researching someone else. I was writing a feature on the Government Film Unit (GFU) documentary preservation programme in 2010 and had reached the point when, at the inception of the GFU in 1948, the lack of Ceylonese technical personnel necessitated the recruitment of outsiders, in particular the Italian director Giulio Petroni. The first GFU documentary of significance, Hill Capital (1950), was directed by him. 

Unselfconscious beauty: Henri Cartier Bresson’s portrait of Lilamani

My interest in Sri Lanka’s documentary history meant I had already written about Petroni’s contribution to the establishment of the GFU, but before the advent of the internet, was unaware of his full career and personal life. Now, with the assistance of the internet, I discovered the background to Petroni’s departure from the GFU in 1950. It had to do with Lilamani Rajasooriya, as told in her half-page obituary – the size an indication of her significance – in The Times of London published on February 2, 2008.

The obituary, “Lilamani Kapoor née Rajasooriya”, includes the sub-heading “Exotic exponent of south Indian dance who took Fifties Italy by storm and graced a glamorous social circle in London”. Tempting enough but disappointingly does not reveal her Ceylon origin. She was the half-Tamil, half-Sinhalese daughter of a successful mercantile family born in 1927 at Kadugannawa. From a young age she exhibited considerable talent as an interpreter of Bharata Natyam. Lilamani was educated at a convent, which, apparently, “gave her a lifelong hatred of nuns”, and then “eased into an arranged marriage to her first husband”. 

Lilamani’s obituary – the only one – was written anonymously, which is unfortunate as whoever was responsible could, if willing, have added much substance to this biography.

Regarding Petroni the obituary states: “Though fortified by her faith in happy endings, she was also frequently the daring architect of her own destiny. In the late 1940s she scandalised her native Ceylon by leaving her husband, the biscuit heir Nicky Seneviratne, for the Italian film director Giulio Petroni, whom she had met while both were employed by the island’s nascent tourist board.

As if being a divorced and working woman was not bad enough, theirs was an interracial union, and when Petroni tried to take her to whites-only venues such as Colombo’s racecourse or smart hotels she was refused entry.”

“In 1951 they married and moved to Italy, where she enjoyed a stroke of fortune,” the obituarist continues. “Henri Cartier-Bresson had been commissioned by Epoca, an Italian magazine, to devote an issue to photographing Asia. He chose his portrait of Lilamani, a noted but unself-conscious beauty, for the cover. When her ship docked in Naples, her face was on newsstands all over Italy.” Cartier-Bresson had visited Ceylon in 1950 in connection with this project and some of his resultant photographs (but not the portrait of Lilamani featured here), can be found on the Magnum Photos website. They are a treasure little-known in Sri Lanka.

Petroni’s show business connections proved useful for Lilamani rapidly became a popular exponent of Bharata Natyam and “captivated Italy with her performances in its provincial theatres, the purveyors of mass entertainment to a country still largely without television”. Apparently she often danced with the legendary Ram Gopal who acted in two films in Ceylon, Ken Annakin’s The Planter’s Wife (1952) and Robert Parrish’s Purple Plain (1954), and also choreographed an extravagant Kandyan dance scene in William Dieterle’s Elephant Walk (1953). If they did perform together after he had made one or more films they would have had Ceylon, as well as dance, as a topic of conversation.

“Soon Lilamani was presenting a nightly arts programme on television – the first in a long line of foreign beauties to prosper in Italy in that medium – and was a fixture in Rome’s dolce vita. Her friends included Marc Chagall, Jean-Paul Sartre, the priapic aristocrat Dado Ruspoli and Jean Cocteau, who painted her.” What awesome friends to have, all foremost figures in artistic and intellectual spheres apart from “priapic” Dado Ruspoli, described as “an occasional actor and a playboy and eccentric aristocrat” who is said to have inspired Federico Fellini to make La Dolce Vita (1960).

Lilamani made a small contribution to the history of cinema, but one brimming with her beauty and lithesome dancer’s form. The first film in which she appeared as “Princess Lilamani” in the role of the “Indian dancer” was Mensogna (1952) – English title Falsehood – directed by Ubaldo Maria Del Colle. It is unclear whether she was already using such a name, perhaps in its Italianized form, Principessa, for her stage performances and TV appearances. The website of Giuseppe Palmas, one of the greatest photo-journalists of the post-WW2 era just lists her as “Lilamani” but alas does not display her portrait. 

Her next appearance, also as Princess Lilamani, on this occasion in the role of “The Raikuuari of Khanipur”, was in a film of much grander status, William Wyler’s romantic comedy, Roman Holiday (1953), starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Destiny decreed that Peck would travel to Ceylon a year later to star in Robert Parrish’s Purple Plain.

The obituarist notes: “Marlon Brando was much taken by her and proposed marriage [presumably he knew a divorce was required]. When she turned him down, he moved on to her rival for the lead in The Mountain (1956), Anna Kashfi – her father was Indian – who he married in 1957.” The marriage lasted just two years.

Brando, unlike other Hollywood heavyweights such as Peck, Alec Guinness, Claudette Colbert, William Holden, and Harrison Ford, never made a movie in South Asia. What a shame Sri Lanka wasn’t chosen as the location of Apocalypse Now instead of the Philippines! Nevertheless, Brando’s colourful imagination chose Sri Lanka and Calcutta as a part of his early existence, prior to stardom. As Gary Carey asserts in Marlon Brando: The Only Contender (1976), “Back in the heyday of Hollywood, studios manufactured biographies to fit stars. Not so with Brando. He had his own fantasy factory. Sometimes he altered the facts to colour an outwardly unexceptional, though frequently troubled, childhood; other times he did it to hoodwink the prying eyes of interviewers.

“Following the information he supplied, the press agents prepared some of the most outrageous biographical sketches ever concocted. Here is one account of Marlon’s life as it appeared in a 1946 Playbill: ‘Born in Bangkok, Siam the son of an etymologist now affiliated with the Field Museum in Chicago, Mr Brando passed his early years in Calcutta, Indo-china, The Mongolian Desert and Ceylon…’”

Lilamani’s marriage to Petroni hit the rocks without Brando’s assistance. While working at the Indian Embassy in Rome she met Shiv Kapoor, a wealthy shipowner. Having divorced Petroni, Lilamani married Kapoor in 1958 and they moved to London. The obituarist claims that Kapoor was “from a princely family in Assam” but such aristocracy has come under scrutiny in recent times.

Of interest is that Petroni directed popular spaghetti westerns such as Death Rides a Horse (1967), starring Lee van Cleef; Tepepa (1968), which included an appearance by Orson Welles; and Night of the Serpent (1969). In 1993 Petroni returned to Sri Lanka to make a documentary on the country for Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and was appalled to find the GFU saddled with some equipment he used 45 years previously. He died in 2010.

Kapoor was of the opinion that there wasn’t an audience in England for Lilamani’s rendition of Bharata Natyam, so with a sense of acute disappointment she hung up her proverbial dancing shoes, or rather in this oriental context anklets and other paraphernalia. The Kapoors became “a prominent social couple, whose friends ranged from sporting peers to Stephen Spender and Princess Margaret’s set. At one stage the Queen was said to be thinking of buying their country home, Buckhurst Park, near Ascot, as a wedding gift for her sister. Instead it was acquired by King Hussein of Jordan, although not before featuring in 1959 in the first Whicker’s World programme”.

The Kapoors also constructed a futuristic house at Virginia Water, Surrey, which was “later let to Diana Dors, and it became the scene of bacchanalian parties before the actress decamped, owing thousands to them in rent”.

Lilamani gave birth to two sons. Sometime later the family moved to Switzerland for tax purposes “and then, in the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, back to Rome in the late Sixties. There Lilamani Kapoor was at her happiest, as part of a bohemian circle of jet-setters, becoming especially close to Steve McQueen”.

The obituarist asserts that like many affluent people in post-Fascist Italy, Lilamani saw no incongruity in harbouring communist sympathies. “Generous of spirit, optimistic and never judgmental, she was also perhaps a touch naive at times, and in 1966 this led to her playing a part in orchestrating the escape from prison of the communist spy George Blake. She signed a deal to write a book about this, but was advised that it would not be in her best interests to publish.”

The revelation that she assisted in springing Blake from the infamous Wormwood Scrubs prison in London is a great surprise. George Blake was a British double-agent serving 42 years for spying for the Soviet Union. For 22 years the truth of his escape remained a secret. There was a widely-held belief that that it must have been a professional operation masterminded by the KGB, the IRA or even the British security services. However in 1988, two radical peace activists Michael Randle and Pat Pottle revealed that they were responsible as they believed the sentence was an ‘outrage’.

There was support from many conventional people in the escape (a sympathetic doctor had treated Blake’s wrist broken in the getaway which involved scaling a wall with a rope ladder) so there is no reason why Lilamani couldn’t have been involved. But what role she played is unclear, although I have to admit I have not read Randle’s and Pottle’s account, The Blake Escape: How we freed George Blake – and why (1989), to check whether she is mentioned.

“Later,” writes the obituarist, “she concentrated on charity work, and on holding court at the Dorchester, to where she would bring Asian friends to meet Barbara Cartland [she wrote a novel set in Ceylon titled Moon over Eden (1976)], whose chaste tales of romance suited her view of life.

Lilamani, who contracted Parkinson’s disease and suffered a major stroke, died on December 27, 2007, aged 80. I mentioned earlier that the Kapoor nobility has been questioned. The Telegraph of Calcutta of June 19, 2009, published a news or rather gossip item about Lilamani’s son Mangal Kapoor titled “’Prince’ tosses wine at scribe”.

It began: “Indian high society in London was today trying to check the family tree of ‘Prince’ Mangal Kapoor after he tossed a glass of wine over a British journalist who had questioned his claimed royal credentials.”

“Mangal Kapoor is not a prince – he is a fake,” declared an angry Indar Pasricha, owner of the art gallery in Connaught Street, London, where the incident took place.

The journalist who had a glass of red wine thrown over him was James Hughes-Onslow, a man who has been to the right school and therefore well placed to write gossip for Londoner’s Diary in the London Evening Standard. “You don’t throw wine over an Old Etonian,” commented a horrified Pasricha. “Mangal Kapoor was not invited but turned up. What had attracted Kapoor’s ire was an item in the diary on April 17.

“It had stated: ‘Mystery surrounds the aristocratic credentials of Prince Mangal Kapoor. Although a man by this name has for many years graced parties, a Punjabi toff questions his pedigree. In The Daily Telegraph Court Circular page recently Prince Mangal Kapoor featured, by virtue of his alleged noble birth.

“’Kapoor is a Punjabi name,’ says Major Narindar Saroop, who comes from a long line of Punjabi administrators. ‘The only Princes there were, or are, Sikh Jats, Muslim Jats, or Hindu Jats like myself. I could call myself a prince, but I don’t. So can Kapoor, but he makes himself look pretentious.’

Another incident earlier in 2009 – January 12 in fact – was more newsworthy. According to the MailOnline: “Some say events organiser Mangal Kapoor might have been on the receiving end of some choice epithets from Prince Philip after barging in front of the Queen at a Guards Polo Club reception. 

“Mangal was running late after dropping off the dowager Lady Killearn – who was holding her 99th birthday party last night – when he noticed another late arrival, a woman in brown.  “As the band struck up, he dashed in front of her mumbling: ‘Sorry, but I don’t want to get there after the Queen.’

“At which the woman replied: ‘There is no danger of that.’ “Says society fixer Kapoor: ‘To my horror, I realised it was the Queen I had nearly pushed out of the way.’”