Revered Indian filmmaker Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, whose work spanned the 1957 Telugu-language classic  Mayabazar  and this year's musical  Sing Geetham,  died Oct. 3 in Chennai following a period of ill health. He was 95.

Rao made some 60 features in the Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Hindi languages, and moved between farce, fantasy, mythology and science fiction. He also composed music for some of his films and took occasional acting roles.

 Sing Geetham,  in which the cast sings rather than speaks, reached cinemas in June this year. It was his first film as director in a decade.

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Rao trained under director K.V. Reddy, assisting on  Mayabazar  (1957) and  Jagadeka Veeruni Katha  (1961). He stepped behind the camera himself in 1972 with the Telugu drama  Neethi Nijayithi.  His Tamil film  Dikkatra Parvathi  (1974) took the Indian National Film Award for best Tamil feature.

Rao's partnership with the actor Kamal Haasan began with the 1979 Telugu comedy  Sommokadidhi Sokokadidhi,  in which Haasan played two parts, and continued with  Raja Paarvai  (1981), Haasan's 100th film and his first as producer.  Pushpaka Vimana  (1987) came next. Rao wrote and co-produced the comedy, and nobody in it utters a line. Haasan plays a broke graduate who passes himself off as a rich man at a hotel, with Amala Akkineni co-starring. Because there was no dialogue to translate, actors could be drawn from across India, and the film went on to win the Indian National Film Award for best popular film providing wholesome entertainment.

Their Tamil run continued with  Apoorva Sagodharargal  (1989), where Haasan took three roles, among them a circus performer with dwarfism, and Indian comedy classic  Michael Madana Kama Rajan  (1990), where Haasan had four roles. They reteamed on  Magalir Mattum  and, in 2005,  Mumbai Xpress. 

That Tamil turn followed Rao's long stint in Kannada with Rajkumar. The star led seven Rao films, beginning with  Haalu Jenu  in 1982, and four of those were later redone in Telugu. In 1988, Rajkumar announced that he planned to step away from acting for a while, and tha

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