Dharmendra always had Devdas In his eyes. He was a 20-year-old boy when his idol Dilip Kumar played the ill-fated lover of the same name. He watched Bimal Roy’s 1955 film repeatedly and mentally prepared himself for the role.
In the mid-1970s, Gulzar cast Dharmendra against type in his version DevdasThe poet-lyricist-filmmaker knew, and Dharmendra had demonstrated many times, that there was more to him than just action,
An incredibly handsome Punjabi youth who came to Bombay to achieve stardom, Dharmendra endured a few false starts before starring in over 300 films in a career spanning 65 years.
It is sad, Devdas Wasn’t one of them. The project was stopped after Gulzar shot a few reels. But, if nothing else, the film that never saw the light of day proved that Dharmendra was a director’s actor whom the best filmmakers of the era could easily trust.
Also Read: ‘Devdas’ starring Dharmendra, Hema Malini that Bollywood missed
reshaping masculinity
In flowers and stonesThe 1966 drama that coined Dharmendra’s tough-guy screen persona, a criminal capable of taking pity on strangers. In a brief sequence, his character takes off his shirt and uses it to cover an old woman shivering in the cold.
That filmy moment was a historic moment. This defined Dharmendra’s masculine brand: aggressive masculinity with gentle tendencies. While that was the basis of Dharmendra’s image, he repeatedly and successfully ventured beyond its boundaries.
As an actor, he embraced a wide spectrum – from the rough and manly to the romantic and gentle, from the comic to the biting, from the emotionally charged to the psychologically hurt, from the playful to the profound. He flitted effortlessly between the indomitable and the weak, the smoldering and the subdued, without ever alienating his core constituency.
media shy but news worthy
Dharmendra, a magnetic but media-phobic veteran who staunchly resisted interviews, went back and forth between Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Chetan Anand and Rajinder Singh Bedi (who directed him in the 1973s). PhagunIn which on one side he had a cameo) and on the other side Prakash Mehra (mausoleum), Manmohan Desai (Dharam-Veer) and Nasir Hussain (procession of memories) on the other.
Dharmendra in a scene from ‘Samaadhi’ (1972).
He reigned supreme from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, an eventful period during which his personal life fueled rumors, leading to frequent clashes with gossip columnists.
popular, reliable, durable
In the late 1990s, he turned to supporting roles If you love then why fear? (1998). A decade later, he was in two commercially successful films, Anurag Basu’s quirky urban drama Life is a… in the metro (2007) and Sriram Raghavan’s neo-noir thriller johnny traitor (2007).
Dharmendra’s popularity was as tremendous as it was durable. Neither the illustrious trio of Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand who came before him, nor the all-conquering duo of Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan, who changed Hindi cinema of the 1970s, could influence the course of his stardom or dim its lustre.
Rajesh Khanna reached the top in 1969 with two huge hits. worship And make roadsMany male stars of that era were swept away, Not Dharmendra, He continued his excellent performance,
His films during this phase ranged from decent dramas directed by Asit Sen and Hrishikesh Mukherjee to crowd-pleasers directed by Arjun Hingorani, which launched the actor. My heart is yours, we are yours too (1960) and then cast her in every one of his films in the 1970s.
Dharmendra with Mala Sinha in his first Hindi film My heart is yours, we are yours too (1960).
Bachchan, who created a stir in the industry chain (1973) and Wall (1975), many careers were threatened with end. Dharmendra stood strong against the angry young man blitzkrieg.
pair to remember
In fact, the story goes that Dharmendra recommended Bachchan to Ramesh Sippy for the biggest hit of 1975, cinderIn the same year, both the actors joined Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s film quietly quietlyVery. There was no similarity between the two films, but like Bachchan, Dharmendra was absolutely comfortable in both.
He was often paired with Hema Malini, who became his second wife in 1980, but there was never a period in Dharmendra’s professional life when he was in danger of falling victim to monotony in terms of the films he chose or the co-actors he worked with.
quiet but permanent entry
First flowers and stones turned him into a major star, Dharmendra had already made his presence felt in Bimal Roy Bandini (1963) and Chetan Anand’s Reality (1964)
Dharmendra with Nutan in Bimal Roy’s film Bandini (1963)
surprising for a man from the land of BhangraDharmendra had limited dancing skills. His two left feet made no difference to his box-office dominance. If anything, it added a dimension to it Jatt Yamla Pagla Deewana Image that screams loud and clear: “Tough guys don’t dance”.
Awards eluded him during his active years as a leading man, but he was eventually awarded a few honors – the Padma Bhushan in 2012 and the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.
that year flowers and stonesCo-starring Meena Kumari, the hit hit the screens, Dharmendra had two other memorable releases – Asit Sen’s Mamta, with Suchitra Sen and Ashok Kumar, and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anupama, with Sharmila Tagore.
Before the end of the decade, he gave one of his best screen performances as an idealistic youth true workStarring Sharmila and directed by Mukherjee.
the roaring seventies
His career skyrocketed with Raj Khosla’s films in the 1970s. my village my countrywhich took advantage of his and Ramesh Sippy’s action star credentials Sita and Geeta,
In Guddi (1971), Mukherjee cast Dharmendra as himself in the matinee idol-inspired story of a middle-class schoolgirl (debutant actress Jaya Bhaduri). On cue, Dharmendra gave consecutive hits in 1972 and 1973.
purple patch started Sita and Geeta And Raja Jani And as the money-spinners conclude with Loafer, Firefly, Across the Lake, Blackmail And procession of memories (all in 1973).
Also read: In pictures , Iconic moments of Dharmendra’s life
connected to your roots
No matter how high he rose to fame, Dharmendra never lost touch with his roots, a trait that shone through in his best screen performances, no matter whose role he was playing – a professor of Botany. quietly quietlyA Sanskrit lecturer in fun or a fictional incarnation of a real-life war hero Reality,
Dharmendra often wrote poetry for his fans and read it on camera. His lines reflect the intelligence of a man who has lived a full life and also reveal the rustic simplicity and emotional directness of his thoughts.
Dharmendra left but has not gone yet. His last film, Ikkis, directed by Sriram Raghavan, is scheduled to release on December 25. And that’s certainly not all. Success stories like his go down in showbiz folklore. it never ends. It lives on in the impressions it leaves.
The author is a New Delhi-based film critic.