After more than 40 years in the limelight, every day is still a challenge for Big B
up close with Bollywood’s Big B
Watching Amitabh Bachchan shake a leg in his recent blockbuster Bol Bachchan reminded me of the time I first saw the superstar in Mumbai. He was shooting Shahenshah (king of kings, in Hindi) at Mehboob Studios and I was hoping to interview him.
As veteran choreographer Kamal Nath was taking the star through his paces, Amitabh listened intently. Then he began to copy Kamal’s steps, “One, two, one, two, three…”
As the portly Kamal tapped his feet and twirled around with surprising ease, the normally stiff Amitabh underwent a transformation. Within seconds, he effortlessly became 30-year-old Vijay Shrivastav – the character he played in the film – as he danced circles around the heroine, Meenakshi Sheshadri.
The 40-strong crew in the studio in suburban Bandra, Mumbai, watched in open admiration as the then 45-year-old actor romanced a girl almost half his age on screen and made it seem entirely plausible.
It was on the same set that I, with the typical brashness of a cub reporter, first approached Bollywood’s reigning superstar for an interview. I was looking for an exclusive and
during a break in filming, sauntered over to where Amitabh was sitting and asked him for an interview. The star’s only reaction was to turn his head to the other side. Unwilling to give up, I walked around to his other side and asked him again. The actor turned his face away again, disinterested.
The people around him became edgy and the film’s director, Tinnu Anand, began making silent apologetic gestures to me from behind, asking me to leave. I did.
Which is not to suggest that the most durable star in the history of Hindi cinema is prone to throw his weight around. He didn’t, even by gesture, indicate to anybody he wanted me out. “I stopped talking to the press because they banned me. It was not the other way around,” he said much later.
The ‘ban’ had to do with the infamous emergency rule in 1975 in India when there was a rumour doing the rounds that Amitabh had a role in getting the government to muzzle the media following a stand-off with the press. In protest, the press boycotted the star. Amitabh later dismissed the rumours as ridiculous.
It would be almost a decade and a half before he would speak to the press again.
Although he was close to the Gandhi family, according to Amitabh, the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, did not formulate policies – such as the crackdown on the media – based on his advice.
But here I was, more than a quarter of a century later, still eager – desperate even – to interview the larger-than-life actor and finally the chance came to have an exclusive telephone chat with the superstar. To a warm and welcoming, “Hello, Mr Bachchan”, the 71-yearold actor replied rather formally, “Hello… this is Amitabh,” before going on to answer questions for Friday and Gulf News Radio. The familiar rich baritone voice I’d heard in the scores of his movies is the same. The timbre of his voice had not paled. After having undergone innumerable ups and downs in his life, including coming back from the brink of death, he has the same verve and zest for life as he did when he started in cinema 45 years ago.
The’s the real reel deal, say the experts
Better known as Big B, Amitabh, say industry analysts, is the only real superstar even in these days of Rs200-crore (Dh118 million) clubs and the three Khans – Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh – reportedly riding high at the box office.
The De Niro of Bollywood as CNN once called him, Amitabh rules not just the big screen but television as well. He is the hugely popular presenter of Kaun Banega Crorepati (the Indian version of WhoWants to be aMillionaire?); he endorses products as diverse as noodles and gold jewellery, is the brand ambassador of the western Indian state of Gujarat, is extremely active on social media with 7,340,706 Twitter followers, and has a hugely popular blog called Bachchan Bol. “God has been kind,’’ Amitabh says of his stupendous success. “The people have been kinder.’’
Amitabh began his life in cinema in 1969. “I applied for a talent contest conducted by Filmfare and Madhuri, popular Indian film magazines at the time,’’ he says. “I applied but didn’t even make it to the preliminaries.’’
However, Amitabh, who was working as an executive for a marketing company in Kolkata, had been bitten by the movie bug.
“I resigned from my job and came to Mumbai, where my brother, Ajitabh, told me that [noted filmmaker] K A Abbas was looking for a new face for his film Saat Hindustani. I sent in my photographs and landed a role.’’ It was a pivotal part that got him noticed even though the film was not a success.
Entering films at the age of 27 at a time when superstar Rajesh Khanna was ruling the roost thanks to his good looks and lover-boy image, Amitabh found the going difficult. He was thin, tall (1.88m), lanky and was considered by many to be a misfit in films simply because he lacked the stereotypical good looks necessary for a Bollywood hero.
But Amitabh was not about to give up easily. “There were times when I was turned back by assistants even before I could walk into a producer’s office,” he says. “The reason was that I was too tall and looked unconventional. At times I felt like quitting. But I persevered.”
It paid off. Amitabh landed a few bit roles in films such as Bombay Talkies, Reshma Aur Shera, and once as a villain in Parwana. He was getting noticed by more and more people and soon went on to play lead roles in Bombay to Goa,
Raaste Ka Patthar and Ek Nazar. But none of them could make a mark at the box office.
Then came Zanjeer in 1973 in which he played an angry young policeman who fought corruption single-handedly.
“At a time when corruption was quite rampant, the audience loved a man who was taking up cudgels on their behalf even if it was only in movies,’’ says filmmaker Shashilal Nair. Almost overnight Amitabh became a sensation. The movie went on to play to packed cinemas and Bollywood’s first action hero was born.
More lead roles came his way. As if to cement his position at the top was the 1975 spaghetti western Sholay where he played a gun for hire. It had all the elements of a Bollywood entertainer – foot-tapping numbers, dances, a huge dose of action, comedy, emotion and melodrama – and was a resounding success. Amazingly, in one cinema – Minerva in Mumbai – it played for a record-breaking five years.
If his critics dismissed Sholay as a multistarrer, Amitabh had an answer with Deewar the same year, where his tour de force performance as the destitute turned gangster carried the film through. Awards too began to come in search of him. Amitabh won the Filmfare best supporting actor award for Anand in 1971 and for Namak Haraam in 1973. He was nominated for a best actor award for Deewar, too.
His career was going stratospheric when in 1982, at the peak, he had an accident while shooting Coolie. He was filming a fight sequence when he fell on the sharp edge of a steel table, rupturing his spleen, haemorrhaging severely. Although he was rushed to Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai, he slipped into a coma.
“The entire nation came to a standstill,’’ recalled the film’s director, Manmohan Desai, at the time. Amitabh was in a coma for a fortnight and even the prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, visited him at the hospital. Prayers and vigils were organised across the country by his fans. Luckily, he survived, and completed the movie that cemented his position as the number-one star in Bollywood.
Three years later he decided to test the waters in politics, supporting his childhood friend, Rajiv Gandhi. Amitabh refers to it as a “purely emotional decision” after the assassination of Rajiv’s mother Indira. But the move was disastrous and the actor barely lasted a couple of years in the extremely volatile world of Indian politics and he quickly returned to
what he knew best: acting. “Going into politics was a huge mistake,’’ he says, reluctant to dwell on it too much.
Over the years, Amitabh has won a clutch of awards for his contribution to cinema including three national awards and a lifetime achievement award at the 2009 Dubai International Film Festival. He was also conferred with the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan, prestigious Indian civilian honours, by the Government of India, while France’s highest civilian honour, the Knight of the Legion of Honour, was conferred upon him in 2007 for his “exceptional career in the world of cinema and beyond”.
Amitabh was the first Indian actor to have a waxwork at Madame Tussauds in London and earlier this year, he received the Global Diversity Award in the UK. Previous winners include the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Hollywood has been heaping praise on Amitabh, too. “There couldn’t be a more gentle, wonderful individual to work with. And astoundingly talented. He’s a magnificent actor and I was honoured to work with him,” Leonardo DiCaprio said of Amitabh’s small but pivotal role of MeyerWolfsheim in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby.
The Big B greets his ‘extended family’
Now, after 183 movies, where does Amitabh’s energy to rule the real, the reel and the social media world come from?
“I keep getting asked this question and I really don’t know,” he says. “The feeling is that perhaps I’m probably doing something exceptional, but I’m not. I enjoy the fact that somebody told me there is a thing called a blog, and if you write something, you can get responses from people and I quite liked the idea.
“The first time I wrote a blog, I got two responses. Then it grew and now it has gone to hundreds and millions of followers. I don’t want to break it because there is a huge attachment now with the people who visit the blog. There is a huge family that has been formed. I do address them as my extended family.”
This from a person who claims to be introverted. “I was very shy as a child,” he once said. “I had a lot of problems and used to struggle doing very simple things, like for instance entering a restaurant all by myself.
“Much later when I was looking to work in films, I met Manojji [actor-filmmaker Manoj Kumar] who told me to meet him at a studio in Filmistan in Mumbai. I remember taking a train from Churchgate to Andheri, walking from the station to the studio’s gate. But I just never had the courage to walk in.
“I repeated this for seven days, but every time, I turned back from the gate.” He never did go in, though he did work in Kumar’s Roti, Kapda Aur Makaan (food, clothing and shelter) in 1974, after he’d made a name for himself.
Even today, he says, there’s not much difference. “I’m very shy even today. But I must admit that acting in films, and putting myself into situations which are unreal has, perhaps, given me a little more confidence. Also, in your personal life you may be one thing, but in your professional life it demands that you express yourself and that’s what I do as an artist.’’
Although he is passionate about movies and everyone except his daughter Shweta is in cinema – wife Jaya Bhaduri is a former actor, son Abhishek Bachchan is a popular Bollywood actor who is married to actor Aishwarya Rai – Amitabh does not feel that he’s doing anything special, or even that he has any special talent that has seen him rein for so many years.
“It’s all due to my directors, and writers that I have been able to act in good films that succeeded,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve done anything special.”
Others, however, wouldn’t agree. “He is a star who is a cut above many others,’’ says filmmaker Sashilal Nair. “For one, his punctuality and discipline during shoots is legendary.”
Amitabh has a simple take on this: “I just feel that if somebody has taken the trouble to set up a timetable that involves me, then I should respect it. It’s a very simple thing.”
In an industry where star tantrums are legendary and where even up-and-coming actors are notorious for turning up late for shoots, punctuality, particularly by a star of Amitabh’s stature, becomes headline news.
“I feel that if I’m asked to come at a particular time, I should be there and that’s how I have conducted my life,” says Amitabh.
That of course, is not the only reason for his success. According to film producer Komal, Amitabh’s ability to keep his ear to the ground has helped him surge ahead in the industry.
“He’s kept himself abreast of all the changes that are happening in films and allied fields, whether it means becoming active on social networks or blogging,” says Komal.
“Many people his age would be at sea when it comes to Twitter and blogging but Amitabh’s so active he puts teenagers to shame! That explains his mind set; he feels he has to keep acting until the very end, he has to keep abreast of the times; he must start thinking like the younger generation of filmmakers who are in charge now in Bollywood.
“And through the minds of those filmmakers he’s able to connect to the younger audiences who still idolise him. His constant endeavour to upgrade and update himself is the reason he’s been able to tide over so many changes.”
Zest for life
Although the injury he sustained on the set of Coolie occurred decades, ago, it has often come back to haunt him. Two years after the incident, he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular ailment that causes muscle weakness and fatigue. He’s had two operations on his stomach for intestinal damage, but that has not stopped him from having a zest for life.
Does he have any regrets? “My greatest regret has been that I could not be a part of my kids’ growing up years,” he has said. “When they were growing up, I was working from morning to night. When I left, they were asleep, when I came back, they were asleep. In many ways I envy Jaya, who spent more time with them.”
He still doesn’t believe he’s very talented, and this is what keeps him striving for more. “I have never really been confident about my career at any stage,” he’s says. “Even then, every day I used to think tomorrow is the end of the world and of my career. I quite honestly felt there were a lot of shortcomings in what I was doing and how I was looking. I never believed the product would succeed. But I am happy that I have traversed all these years of my career.”
Amitabh says he doesn’t use any techniques while acting. “I’m not trained to be an actor,’’ remarks the son of poet Harivanshrai Rai Bachchan. “I enjoy working in films. It’s more instinctive.’’ Instinct, he says, is more important than a rehearsed approach when performing before a camera.
Amitabh still feels his producers and writers deserve the credit for his success.
“If you talk of the angry young man image I had in my initial successes, or flair for comedy in my later films, it is because Manji [the late filmmaker Manmohan Desai] and Prakash Mehra offered me roles,” he says.
“The writers Salim-Javed who wrote many scripts for me, writer Kader Khan, all these wonderful writers, they just wrote scripts for me and I went and performed. That was it.”
Even Hollywood does not move him these days. “I just want to keep working until the very end,” he says. “I wouldn’t consider The Great Gatsby [as a Hollywood debut]; it was more a friendly gesture to Baz Luhrmann who was visiting India, and came to see me.
“We didn’t talk then, but a year and a half later he called and said to me, ‘I have a small guest appearance I would like you to do’. And I just did it. It wasn’t a commercial deal.”
Film fans can rest assured that Amitabh has no idea of giving it all up. “It’s all been very challenging, every role, every day, has been very challenging,” he says. “Nothing is simple in the creative field. Every day is a new challenge.” ● Sthekkepat@gulfnews.com@Shiva_friday