On my calendar for today is “Sabu (unless someone more Christmasy comes up).” But then I decided, you know, for a lot of us, the holidays are over. Yule was Tuesday. Hanukkah was early this month. There are plenty of non-Christmas holidays that are done that mean a lot of us are just kind of, you know, sitting around today, not really doing much of anything. So why shouldn’t we celebrate with someone who, to my knowledge, has actually nothing to do with Christmas and may not have even celebrated it?

Sabu, whose birth name is a matter of some uncertainty but was probably Selar Sabu, was the son of a mahout. When he was nine, his father died. When he was thirteen, he appeared in Elephant Boy, an adaptation of a Kipling story. He was considered extremely successful in the role, and the boy and his older brother ended up in the UK, where they learned English and were declared wards of the British state—I don’t know what happened to their mother—and then from there moved to the United States. Sabu became a US citizen and even fought as a tail gunner during World War II.

And, let’s be real, his career was limited because he was Indian. I mean, everyone agrees he was a great actor. Unfortunately, he was a great actor in the US in the early to mid twentieth century. Which means under the Code. So he can’t ever be a romantic lead unless they find an Indian actress to costar, and there were no Indian actresses who were big names in Hollywood at the time. And, yes, he appeared in Black Narcissus, but there simply weren’t a lot of adult roles available to an actor of his ethnicity.

Now, I’ll freely admit there are a lot of child stars who didn’t make it into adult stardom. Some of them arguably came from more stable families than Sabu—nothing against his brother, but his father had died, and he and his brother moved halfway across the world to a new culture that spoke a different language. That’s a lot to deal with, and the implication I’m getting is that they were both minors at the time. But I’m also unaware of any particular issues on Sabu’s part—no drug addiction, no acting out, nothing like that.

He tried to get a job in a Hindi film and couldn’t get a work permit, because he was now a US citizen. His last film was actually a Disney movie that I don’t think I’ve ever seen; he died three months before it was released. He went to a doctor for a routine check-up shortly before he died and was told he was so healthy the doctor would be out of business if everyone were like him. I don’t know what the doctor missed, but Sabu died of a massive heart attack at the age of only 39. He had two children, both of whom followed him into the entertainment industry.

Obviously, I don’t really do Christmas presents under that name, but it would be festive of you if you’d support my Patreon or Ko-fi!