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Actor Suneil Anand , fondly launched into the Hindi film world by his father Dev Anand in ‘Anand aur Anand’ (1984), passed away following a heart attack in London. He was 70.

“We are comforted by the outpouring of love, prayers, and support, for which we are truly grateful. We kindly request privacy as we navigate this difficult time together,” his niece, Gina Narang, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Incidentally, Dev Anand also died in the same city in 2011.

“Suneil didn’t seem ambitious. But he was extremely sincere towards his work. He was also very respectful towards senior actors,” recalled Raj Babbar, who worked with him in the film.

“My sincere condolences to his mother,” he added. Suneil's mother, Kalpana Kartik, a film star in the 1950s, is 94.

The 1980s saw a bunch of star sons being launched in style such as Kumar Gaurav, Sunny Deol and Sanjay Dutt. Suneil also made a carefully-crafted debut with much fanfare. He had learnt kung-fu in Hong Kong and displayed a felicity with dance moves as well as action scenes in ‘Anand aur Anand’.

The film’s bouncy tracks, composed by R D Burman, proved to be popular. “Mr Ratan Tata who headed CBS Records at the time took keen interest in its (music) launch,” Suneil told this reporter in an email interview in 2020. But the film didn’t work.

Suneil also played the lead in the smartly lensed ‘Car Thief’ (1986), opposite Vijeta Pandit. He also starred in ‘Main Tere Liye’ (1988), directed by uncle Vijay Anand. A martial arts aficionado, he directed, ‘Master’ (2001), where the fights were choreographed by Hong Kong masters. None of these films succeeded at the box-office. Suneil had been working on a movie, Vagator Mixer for some years.

In his autobiography, ‘Romancing With Life’, Dev Anand provides a vivid account of how he was over the moon on hearing the news of his son’s birth. He was shooting for ‘Paying Guest’ for director Subodh Mukerji and enacting a drunken scene when the news arrived from a nursing home in Zurich. “I was in such high spirits that I gave a brilliant shot, probably my best in the film,” writes the star of superhits films such as CID, Johny Mera Naam and many more.

Shortly, Dev Anand and his wife Kalpana were invited to the Karlovy Vary film festival in (then) Czechoslovakia. The actor writes that an 86-year-old delegate and Suneil, then just two weeks old, were photographed together by the local press. The front page of a local newspaper carried the photo with the caption, “The oldest and the youngest delegates.”

In one of the chapters in the autobiography, Dev emotionally talks about flying out to Washington to meet Suneil who was studying there in a university. The Evergreen star writes how they embraced with moist eyes, how Suneil showed him around the campus, offered him a guided car tour of the US capital and helped him buy sunglasses. “These were great fatherly moments for me after the brutally harsh working schedule I had thrown myself into all these years, that kept me away from my family,” he says.

With Suneil's passing another chapter from the famed film family comes to a close.