Throughout his acting career, his acting style could best be summed by his famous line in the film "Padayappa" – "En vazhi, thani vazhi” (My way is entirely my own). There was also "ChaalBaaz", "Bhagwaan Dada" and "Bulandi".įrom flipping his cigarette or sunglasses, walking in slow motion to flashing that cheeky smile with a glint in his eye, Rajinikanth has also been an inimitable style icon. The actor also flirted with Bollywood in "Hum" and "Andha Kanoon", co-starring his inspiration Amitabh Bachchan.
The real breakthrough came with next year''s "Moondru Mudichu", another film directed by Balachander, with whom the actor went on to forge a longstanding and successful relationship.Īfter a brief phase of portraying antagonistic characters, he starred in positive roles in "Kavikkuyil", "Sahodarara Savaal" (Kannada) and "Chilakamma Cheppindi" (Telugu), in which he played the protagonist for the first time in his career.īy the end of 1980, he had worked in all south Indian languages and established a career in Tamil cinema. On the advice of noted Tamil director K Balachander, Rajinikanth quickly took to learning Tamil and made his debut in the filmmaker''s 1975 movie "Apoorva Raagangal". That he got a job as a coolie and then a bus conductor with the Bangalore Transport Service (BTS) before deciding to take up an acting course at the Madras Film Institute at the encouragement of friend and co-worker Raj Bahadur is part of the legend, a fabled story much told. His films may sometimes receive a lukewarm reception from critics, but the ''Rajini'' phenomenon ensures the numbers at the box office, and has done so for close to five decades.īorn Shivaji Rao Gaekwad in Bengaluru, Mysore State (present day Karnataka) in a Marathi family, Rajinikanth was the youngest of four siblings - two brothers and a sister - and grew up speaking Marathi and Kannada.Ī sports enthusiast since his school days, Rajinikanth participated in plays at the Ramakrishna Math in Bengaluru.įollowing his father’s retirement in 1956, the family moved to the suburb of Hanumantha Nagar in Bengaluru. Popularly called ''Thalaivar'' (leader in Tamil), the very announcement of a new film or his birthday is regarded as nothing short of a festival for his fans, from Japan (where he is known as Baba and has a cult following) to Sri Lanka.
People may or may not have seen his films but are most certainly familiar with the frenzy that surrounds his releases.įans lining up overnight in serpentine queues outside theatres for a first day-first show come rain, summer or winter, bathing his posters in milk, showering his cutouts with flowers and chucking coins on screen were par for the course for a Rajini film. That the dazzling rise, from coolie and bus conductor to the ever-reigning predominantly South star of films such as "Enthiran”, “2.0” and “Kaala”, could be the stuff of the cheesiest movie script only adds to the mystique. The dichotomy between the reel Rajini with exaggerated, stylised movie star mannerisms and the real man with no apparent pretensions is sharp – and quite unique. With his balding pate and greying hair, the 70-year-old is unlike many of the others though and rewrites many rules of traditional showbiz. Rajinikanth, who was on Thursday named for the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the government’s highest honour for Indian cinema, is cast in classic matinee idol mould with stories of mass adulation on a scale rare for even the biggest stars. New Delhi, Apr 1 (PTI) There are superstars and then there is Rajinikanth, the most glittering perhaps in the Indian cinematic firmament whose demi-god status has spawned an entire ‘Rajini culture’ of jokes, devoted fandom and box-office success that is almost always more about him than his film.
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