ඇන්ජලින් ගුණතිලක
65 songs performed
Anjalin Gunathilaka (also spelled Anjaleen Gunathilaka, and Angeline Gunathilake, ඇන්ජලින් ගුණතිලක) was a Sri Lankan playback singer whose voice carried Sinhala film music from the late 1950s into the new century. Born Angelina Rachel de Lanerolle on 23 December 1939 in Matara, she became one of the most recorded female voices in Sinhala cinema, remembered for duets with H. R. Jothipala and for songs such as Miyuru Pem Madirawe and Pata Podak Thilakala.
Gunathilaka was the seventh of ten children. Her family moved from Matara to Colombo when she was a child, and she was schooled at St. Mary’s Convent. She trained under the composer Sunil Santha and earned an A-grade rating as a singer through the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, the standard gateway for serious vocalists of her generation.
Her playback career began in the late 1950s, with early film work around 1958. Over the decades that followed she sang for more than two hundred films, and her prolific output earned her the nickname the “silver bell” of Sinhala cinema. She is widely cited as holding the record for the most playback recordings by a female singer in the Sinhala film industry, with a body of work spanning roughly six decades to 2017.
Anjalin Gunathilaka is most closely associated with her partnership with H. R. Jothipala, whose duets with her remain staples of old Sinhala radio. She also recorded with Mohideen Baig and C. T. Fernando among others. Her solo and duet recordings include several still in steady rotation today.
Anjalin Gunathilaka died on 29 March 2019 at the National Hospital in Colombo, aged 79. For listeners who grew up with Sinhala film songs, the Anjaleen Gunathilaka catalogue is a record of an entire era of cinema playback, and her recordings, including those of Angeline Gunathilake under the spellings used abroad, continue to find new audiences among the diaspora.
Every Sinhala lyric, composition, and song credit by Anjalin Gunathilaka.