No Indian actor has come closer to Hollywood more often, with more credibility and more international validation, than Kamal Haasan. Yet none of those ambitions has translated into a completed Hollywood film.

Kamal Haasan is arguably the most technically accomplished actor Indian cinema has ever produced. He has starred in seven films submitted as India’s official entry for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. Nayakan was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time. He has won three National Awards for Best Actor and a National Award for Best Feature Film in Tamil as producer of Thevar Magan. He speaks Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Kannada and English fluently and has a working knowledge of Bengali and French. By any reasonable international standard, he should have been the Indian actor who crossed over.

However, he did not.…