Indroducing: Shahrukh Khan
Imagine Leonardo DiCaprio, never fallen from the wave of his Titanic popularity and still a popular darling to end all popular darlings. Then imagine Tom Cruise, on steroids which double his charisma and acting ability. Now combine those two, and you’ll come pretty close to Shahrukh Khan. Shahrukh Khan isn’t just a legend in India – he’s practically an institution. I have it on good authority that there are people in India who literally worship him as if he were a god. A one-man phenomenon, there was a point in time when to co-star opposite Shahrukh meant that you had made it. Better known as SRK or sometimes just “The King”/”King Khan”, he’s won literally dozens of popular and critical acting awards over the course of a long and successful film career which began in 1992 with Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, which as far as I know was a not particularly spectacular film but which gave him his start (he’d previously appeared in a few television series). After Raju he starred in a film every year, but it wasn’t until 1995 with Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (read the C&I review of it here) that his career really took off. The longest-running film in Bollywood history, Dilwale Dulhani Le Jayenge, otherwise known as DDLJ or The Brave Heart will Take the Bride, was a smash hit to end all smash hits and became an instant legend and Bollywood classic(it is still one of the most famous Bolly films ever made). Shahrukh’s co-star in the film, Kajol, also became a superstar largely due to her performance in the film, and Kajol and Shahrukh remain one of Bollywood’s favorite onscreen pairings, having appeared together in three other highly successful films. Since DDLJ, Shahrukh has starred in a host of both popular and not-so-popular films, but his star has never faltered and by and large the movies he chooses tend to be hits, and as one of Bolly’s most sought-after stars he has worked with some of the best directors and producers, to the extent that a list of Bollywood’s “best” and/or most famous films reads at least partially like a Shahrukh filmography (see Veer-Zaara, Devdas, etc.). An extremely hard-working actor, he’s appeared in at least one film every single year since 1992, and his popularity has never really faltered since DDLJ, making him one of the few bona-fide film stars in the world today. He has since branched into film production and television producing. IMDB puts it as “There is not a dot in Bollywood that does not carry Shahrukh Khan’s name”. He was named one of Time Magazine’s 20 Asian Heroes under 40 in 2004. In 2008, Newsweek named him one of the 50 most powerful people in the world
Despite all this fame and power , Shahrukh has not become an egotistical maniac ala Tom Cruise. Amazingly, he married very early in his career and has remained a faithful husband to his wife, carrying the mantle of King of Romance and yet sometimes refusing to kiss his co-stars for the sake of his wife. Highly charming, he comes across as confident and yet not drunk on success, and while I don’t expect much from him, any superstar who can stay married and refrain from jumping on couches has my vote. Endlessly versatile and talented, Shahrukh sometimes seem as if he wasn’t just born for the screen – he seems to own it.
Follow on Twitter(iamsrk)
Re-posting this review from an older blog.