Look at Vijay’s furious expression in Zanjeer, when he kicks the chair in the police station and tells Sher Khan (played by a terrific Pran), ‘Jab tak baithne ko na kaha jaaye, sharafat se khade raho. When we first met these characters, we instinctively understood that they had already survived some personal hell. In these films, there was something bruised and brooding about him. Unlike the other leading men of the time, he wasn’t handsome in that fair-skin, ‘khaate-peete-ghar-ka’ way. In films like Zanjeer, Deewaar, Sholay and Trishul, Mr Bachchan delivered performances that still crackle with frisson. The Angry Young Man, created by the brilliant Salim-Javed in the early ’70s, was an archetype that shaped the narrative in mainstream Hindi cinema for two decades. Some of my favourite Hindi films are still the ones from the 1970s that firs established him as a star. We grew up on the singular heroism of Mr Bachchan. So outsized and dazzling that we barely noticed anything else in the frame. For those of us who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, he was, as India Today magazine dubbed him, a one-man industry. Your take and your degree of attachment to Mr Bachchan (I wouldn’t dare address him as anything but that or ‘Sir’) depend on your vintage, gender, taste. When an actor has lasted that long, he becomes a human Rorschach test, signifying different things to different people. He cuts a colossus-like figure, towering over films, television, commercials, the press and even social media, with millions of followers across platforms. He has been a part of our collective psyche for more than fifty years. I can’t remember why, but he declined to do the shoot.Īmitabh Bachchan is India’s most enduring superstar.
And yet, something about his voice was so commanding that I had to sit down to have the conversation. I considered myself too professional and too inherently cool to be swayed by Bollywood stardom. I was a newbie but I had a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. I left messages with his secretary, which is what talent managers were called then.Ī few days later, he called back. On the wish list was the leading man who had defined Hindi cinema for decades. I was an editorial assistant, helping to line up the talent.
The great American photographer Mary Ellen Mark had been commissioned by the film magazine Premiere to do a photoshoot with leading actors in the Hindi film industry. We were speaking on the phone, sometime in 1995.
It was my first encounter with the actor. This is Amitabh,’ he said, as though that baritone could belong to anyone else.
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