Activist and actor Vira Sathidar, best known for featuring in the National Award-winning film Court, died on Tuesday due to coronavirus-related complications, PTI reported. He was 62 years old.

Sathidar was undergoing treatment at the All India Institute Of Medical Sciences in Nagpur. A hospital official said that the activist had been admitted to the medical facility last week. He died at 3.42 am on Tuesday following a coronavirus-induced pneumonia with respiratory failure.

Chaitanya Tamhane, the director of Court, said that Sathidar was put on ventilator support. “It is an extremely unfortunate news,” Tamhane told PTI. “It is yet to sink in. He was not only an actor, activist and a poet but also one of the nicest human beings I have met.”

Sathidar was an active participant in the Ambedkarite movement in Maharashtra and held the post of convenor of the Indian People’s Theatre Association.

In the 2015 Marathi legal drama Court, Sathidar played the role of Narayan Kamble, a poet-activist who was accused of abetting the suicide of a manual scavenger through one of his folk songs.

Many activists and Sathidar’s colleagues paid their tributes and expressed their condolences on Tuesday.