| The Great & Good
Bollywood stars Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Shah Rukh Khan,
Manisha Koirala and Rahul Khanna tell us how they got started in
the industry.
Amitabh Bachchan
Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest star India has ever seen, was told on his arrival in Bombay that he would never make it. This has gone down in Bollywood folklore as one of the world's near misses, as if Elvis had been told not to sing.
It wasn't until he was nearly 30 that he plucked up enough courage to send his photos in to different producers. The response was unanimously negative. He was thought to be too tall, to have a face like a horse and to be weirdly gangly. One director told him, "Cut your legs off and then come back and see me."
It wasn't until director KA Abbas saw his photo and decided that he would make a good Urdu poet for his 1969 film about national integration, Saat Hindustani that he got his first break. And even then, on discovering that his father was the poet Harivanshrai Bachchan, Abbas made Bachchan wait for a week while he got Bachchan Sr's permission to cast him.
But this lucky break didn't instantly result in fame and fortune. Bachchan had to rely on friends for lodging for many years. One night, with nowhere to crash, he had to sleep on the benches on Bombay's Marine Drive. "The rats in Bombay," he notes, "are really big." But he was determined to be self-reliant. "I had left my job and arrived in Bombay with nothing but my driver's license. I thought, 'If I don't make it as an actor I can always become a taxi driver.'"
Luckily for cinema, he didn't give up. Five years after his first film, he hit the big time with the 1973 super hit Zanjeer. After that, all possibility of being anything but a superstar melted away.
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Shashi Kapoor
Shashi Kapoor was born to act. His whole family acted and his first memories are of acting. As the third son of cinema legend Prithviraj Kapoor, he played kid's roles in his father's films from when he was eight years old. When he was a teenager he had the "extreme good fortune" to have the run of the studio operated by his elder brother, the 1950s star Raj Kapoor. He remembers, "My friends and I would go in at weekends and mess about making films on a Super 8 camera."
But it was acting that was the family's main love. Kapoor recalls that once when he was in pain his father put a mirror in front of his face and said, "Remember this face, this is what you look like when you are in pain. People forget pain or they wouldn't be able to live."
In 1956 he says he was, "Loaned by my father to a friend of his, Geoffrey Kendal, to act the young leads in his company, Shakespeareana". While the company toured the world, Kapoor fell in love with Kendal's daughter Jennifer. (His other daughter is the British actress Felicity Kendal). They got married in 1960 and moved to Bombay. Kapoor was forced to leave the theatre he loved and, he says, "Join films for primarily economic reasons". In the theatre he was earning 150 rupees a month. In films he could make over 400.
It wasn't easy at first. Although he says he was, "Very grateful to my family, at the beginning it worked against me. I was having to work against comparisons with my father, with my brothers Raj and Shammi Kapoor." He kept his credentials as a serious actor by working with Merchant Ivory on their first films, The Householder, Shakespeare Wallah and Bombay Talkie and made it into the big time in the mainstream cinema when he stared in Yash Chopra's 1965 hit Waqt.
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Shah Rukh Khan
Shah Rukh Khan didn't want to act; he wanted to make commercial. Acting was just something that he did while he was completing his degree in communications.
Khan had started acting with India's top theatre director, Barry John. But as soon as the television industry took off, he and the other members of the theatre troupe quickly took advantage of the sudden glut of parts available. He says, "We were all very excited. We had paying jobs and we got to see ourselves on the screen."
Then in 1991 Khan's mother died leaving him with almost no family. "I had got a couple of film offers because of the television work that I had done, so I decided to go to Bombay to help me get over the fact that I had lost both my parents. I said that I would stay for one year, do some work, and then go back to complete my degree and make ad films. I am still trying to get to make ad films."
He was under no illusions about the kind of work he would be doing; Bollywood film is totally different to theatre acting. But he says that he decided to have fun. "I think that actors have become lazy in trying to capture the real. If a situation is totally unreal then that is better for an actor."
He was lucky, when he arrived in Bombay, that he had friends he could stay with who supported him and his desire to act. Another newcomer, the actress Juhi Chawla, lived with her mother and brother but found space for Khan and his wife Gauri to stay. But not everyone was so convinced by his filmi credentials. One friend constantly ribbed him: "Your hair is like a bear. How will you become a hero if your hair is like a bear?"
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Manisha Koirala
Manisha Koirala fell in love with the glamorous fantasy world of theatre and films when she was growing up in Nepal. For her, becoming a part of it was "an impossible dream". She set about becoming a doctor but the call of Bombay remained. She remembers, "My mother and I flew down to Bombay for a week. It was kind of a birthday gift to me. Through her friend who was a film journalist we met many producers. I was lucky enough to be signed on by Subhash Ghai. This was the best platform for me to be launched from."
Ghai had gained a reputation by this time as a star maker, taking newcomers and transforming them into fully-fledged stars. The film that was used as a vehicle for Koirala, Ghai's 1991 film Saudager had horse riding in it. Koirala was "extremely nervous during the shooting, but that didn't stop me from bunking my horse riding classes and learning how to drive instead. When it was time for me to do the shot, I thought, 'This is it, I'm dead.' So I just got on the horse and tried to give the shot. I got such a firing [telling off] from Subhash."
Koirala warns anyone who is thinking of joining the industry: "It takes a lot of perseverance, there is a lot of hardship and hard work. You have to be prepared for a long slog. There may be perks but it's not an easy life. I think that non-actors have a better life." When asked why she stays she says, "I have been here for 10 years without even realising it. This is my life. I am a film person. I can't imagine living without other film people."
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Rahul Khanna
Rahul Khanna is the top star of 'crossover' cinema, the name given
to the mingling of Bollywood and Western filmmaking talent. He has
worked on two films with Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, had a couple
of smaller roles in Hollywood and is all set to bring Bollywood
to the West in his next film Elaan, due out this autumn.
As the youngest son of heartthrob Vinod Khanna, he always knew he
wanted to be part of the entertainment industry. He wasn't immediately
sold on acting but studied all aspects of filmmaking. He found that
he just, "Enjoyed acting the most so decided to give it a go."
When MTV arrived in India, he got his first job as a video jockey,
and was an instant hit. It wasn't until Deepa Mehta was casting
for Earth that he made the move to the big screen. His role
as a nice Hindu masseur won him the Filmfare award for best debut.
On his first day of shooting he arrived on set early, all keyed
up, only to find that Mehta had cancelled the day's shoot. "The
first time she has ever done this in her entire working life! I
didn't take this as a very good omen. But luckily we resumed the
next day and I got to kiss Nandita Das in front of 80 people and
a camera. I thought, 'Well if the rest of my career is like this
that would be OK.'"
Since then Khanna hasn't found acting in the Indian film industry
easy. Having trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New
York, he wants to embrace less generic Bollywood cinema. "For someone
like me, the choice is limited. As a creative person I want to do
things that satisfy me creatively. The film industry here has not
done this. But luckily it is changing, so hopefully there is light
at the end of this particular tunnel."
For more information on the movers and shakers in the Bollywood
film industry, check out the channel4.com/film website.
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