As a star athlete and skillful actor, Norman Pritchard was intimately aware of the vagaries of fame. “There is nothing to the fame that blazes one’s name aloft in electric letters overnight,” he said. “One is quite apt to awaken one day and find that the electric letters spell failure where they once spelled success.”

Both success and failure had courted him at different times. In 1900, he became the first British Indian or Indian, , to win an , only to have his sporting career killed by an injury. A few years later, he became an actor, making a name for himself in photoplays and early silent films. But accusations of domestic violence took the sheen off his star.

By the end of his short life, the proscenium as well as the podium seemed distant from his reality. Mental health troubles left him delusional and led to his confinement in a California sanatorium. They were eventually cited as the cause of his early death in October 1929.

Pritchard was born in Calcutta in either 1875 or 1877, depending on the record you consult. His father, George, an Englishman born in Bengal, was a trader of tea, indigo and jute, and Pritchard spent his early...