Thomas Beach Alter is an Indian actor of American descent. He is a television actor, best known for his work in Bollywood, and has also worked in the theatre. In 2008, he was awarded Padma Shri by the Indian government. A native of Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India, Tom Alter is the son of American Christian missionaries of English and Scottish ancestry and has lived for years in Mumbai and the ...Thomas Beach Alter is an Indian actor of American descent. He is a television actor, best known for his work in Bollywood, and has also worked in the theatre. In 2008, he was awarded Padma Shri by the Indian government. A native of Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India, Tom Alter is the son of American Christian missionaries of English and Scottish ancestry and has lived for years in Mumbai and the Himalayan hill station of Landour. His father was born in Sialkot, now in Pakistan. His elder sister Martha Chen has a PhD in South Asian Studies and his brother John is a poet and a teacher. As a child, he studied Hindi and, consequently, he has occasionally been referred to as the "Blue-eyed saheb with impeccable Hindi." He studied at the Film and Television Institute of India. His major inspiration to enter films was Rajesh Khanna. He confessed in an interview "I still dream of being Rajesh Khanna. For me, in the early 1970s, he was the only hero romantic to the core, not larger than life, so Indian and real he was my hero; the reason I came into films and he still is." He is married, with two children, a son, Jamie, and daughter, Afshaan. He is a life member of International Film And Television Club & International Film And Television Research Centre of Asian Academy of Film & Television. Alter taught at St. Thomas school in Jagadhri (Haryana) for $50 a month before taking to films. He worked as a sports teacher at the school. He used to coach cricket in the school. His crisp columns on sport have enthralled readers of popular newspapers and journals to which he contributed for ten years. He loved his job and the small town of Jagadhri. In his own words, "There was something very warm about Jagadhri. I remained a teacher there until the day I watched Rajesh Khanna romance Sharmila in Aradhana. That was the beginning of my addiction to cinema." Alter is fluent in Hindi and knowledgeable of Indian culture. He has worked for noted filmmakers like Satyajit Ray in Shatranj Ke Khilari and is remembered for his role as a British officer in Kranti. In Sardar, the 1993 film biography of Indian leader Sardar Patel, which focused on the events surrounding the partition and independence of India, Alter portrayed Lord Mountbatten of Burma. He has also played Indian characters in Indian television series, such as the long-running Junoon, in which he was the sadistic mob lord Keshav Kalsi. He also acted in Hollywood movie One Night with the King with Peter O'Toole. Sachin Tendulkar's first ever television interview was with Tom Alter, when a 15-year-old Sachin faced a video camera for the first time ever as a cricketer in between practice sessions of his Ranji team Bombay in 1988. Alter appeared many a times in Theatre. In 'Ghalib In Delhi' he played the role of Mirza Ghalib, the great erstwhile Urdu poet.