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After 18 consecutive flops, Shammi Kapoor reinvented himself to become a star
Updated On: 21 October, 2023 11:52 AM IST | Mumbai | mid-day online correspondent
Shammi Kapoor Birth Anniversary 2023: The legendary actor was all set to give up on acting after18 flops in the beginning when fate landed Tumsa Nahi Dekha in his lap
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Shammi Kapoor
From a prominent family of actors, Shammi Kapoor initially considered a career in science before following his father and elder brother into the film industry but faced a tough time with his first 18 films tanking. It was then he reinvented himself to portray a new brand of hero, inspired by both James Dean and Elvis Presley. In the process, Shammi Kapoor not only laid the way for a host of dancing male leads, from Joy Mukherjee and Jeetendra in his heyday, and then, down the decades, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Mithun Chakraborty, Govinda, Shah Rukh Khan, and his own great-nephew Ranbir Kapoor, but also transformed the very paradigm of the Hindi film hero, and in a way, Hindi films.
Gone was the silent, soft-spoken, upright hero - the meek one like his own elder brother Raj Kapoor, or the brooding one like Dilip Kumar - to be supplanted by a flamboyant, swaggering figure, with a casual approach to life, and not hesitant or apologetic in enjoying its pleasures - even ahead of the jaunty Dev Anand, who could never match that level of exuberance. And for this type of hero, the light musical film - intended as pure entertainment without any messages - came into its own, and became the norm, rather than the exception. Shammi Kapoor, who was born this day (October 21) in 1931, himself said that he found the heroes of his own epoch (the 1950s) too "laid-back and defeatist, forever wallowing in self-pity" and decided to "implant a spine", and "add some machismo" to them.
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