Man who left lasting imprint on Malayalam cinema

Sreenivasan, one of Mal ay alam cinema’s most infl ue ntial actors, writers and fil mmakers, died in Kochi on Saturday, December 20, 2025, following a prolonged battle with cardiac and related ailments.

- HD Bureau

He was 69.Widely regarded as a transformative figure who reshaped the moral and social grammar of popular cinema in Kerala, his death marks the end of an era defined by sharp wit, humanist realism and an unsparing eye for everyday hypocrisy.

Bornin Thalassery in 1956, Sreenivasan entered cinema not through the conventional star route but as a writer with an insti-nective grasp of social contradiction. Trained at the Film and Television Institute of India, Chennai, he brought to Malayalam films a literary sensibility rooted in observation rather than ornamentation. His early scripts, marked by colloquial dialogue and moral ambiguity, challenged the dominant melodramatic structures of the late 1970s and 1980s, foregrounding flawed protagonists drawn from the middle and lower-middle classes.