SHAMMI Kapoor's journey to Bollywood stardom began with prolonged and unremitting failure, with film after film bombing while critics savaged his acting, dancing and singing.
The mediocrity of his performances and the banality of the movies in which he starred made them laughable, until he changed his hairstyle, reinvented his screen persona and turned himself into India's answer to Elvis Presley. Overnight, he became a star.
That the industry kept pursuing him had something to do, no doubt, with perseverance but probably had much more to do with who he was: the second son of veteran theatre and Bollywood actor Prithviraj Kapoor. His older brother was Raj Kapoor, in his day one of the biggest three stars in Hindi movies, while another brother, Shashi, also became a successful actor.
It was a wonder to everybody in the industry that shaving off his pencil moustache, adopting a ducktail haircut and thrusting his hips could so radically transform his fortunes. The new Shammi Kapoor was first unveiled to popular acclaim in the late 1950s in Tumsa Nahi Dekha, looking remarkably like Presley with a touch of James Dean. In 1961 he released the film that remains one of the greatest blockbusters in the Hindi film industry and which placed him alongside the acting legends, Junglee.
The music mostly made it; it is hummed across India still, and the movie remains the brightest star in Kapoor's nearly 50-year career. He was now up there with the top trio of Bollywood: Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand. The westernised tone of the film captured the mood of youthful aspiration in 60s India: Kapoor wore leather jackets, T-shirts and a wardrobe of fine foreign garb. The film taught the rest of the Hindi movie industry that Indian teenagers were moving on, and that it should respond.
After Junglee he was everywhere, appearing as leading man in a ceaseless flow of rubber-stamp films in which bad man gets his comeuppance, hero saves girl before singing and dancing her into the sunset. They were what Bollywood did best, escapism for the masses. Kapoor had no illusions. He knew that a good deal of his films were nothing but silly fun and in old age made no attempt to excuse himself for it.
"The most wonderful thing about the films of my times was the innocence," he said. "Those were happy movies . . . hero meets heroine, chases her, sings seven or eight songs to impress her. I belong to the era when films were simple. They didn't tax your brains. My films, at least, were not thought-provoking. They were hardcore entertainers."
Most of Kapoor's hit songs were sung by somebody else, a professional singer called Mohammad Rafi, and his death was devastating both professionally and personally. "I lost my voice. I cried like hell."
Kapoor's modesty about his films extended to his own performances in them. He seemed to be proud of his gambolling, flamboyant manner of acting, but despite all the onscreen dancing he never truly mastered the art of dance.
"I never learned how to dance," he said. He once joined a dance school to learn tango, but gave it up after five lessons in which he "learned nothing". What he gave his dancing, he felt, was the appropriate physical expression to complement his songs.
In 1955 he met his first wife, Geeta Bali, on the set of a film in which she had a small role - she later became a well-known actress - but she died of smallpox while he was filming Teesri Manzil in 1965, leaving him to raise two children. He was contractually obliged to continue filming with hardly a break, and remembered it all his life as a shattering experience.
His output in his 60s heyday was often predictably lightweight fodder for the poor, but he did throw a surprise with Brahmachari, playing to great acclaim a man looking after abandoned children. It was a box-office success and won him the Filmfare Award for best actor.
In 1971, now starting to look like an improbable heartthrob, he starred in a movie for the last time. Thereafter, he played character
roles, generally to good, or at least polite, reviews. Vidhata, Hero and Prem Rog were best received among a flow of otherwise mostly forgotten films.
Film was always in his life, from infancy to shortly before his death. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) but spent a good deal of his childhood in Calcutta (now Kolkata) where his father was making films with New Theatre Studios. He was 22 before he made his disastrous debut in Bollywood, and was about 70 when he finally retired to his great obsession: computers and the internet.
Several years ago he was invited to the opening of Yahoo!'s office in Mumbai, where Kapoor was told by the company's co-founder, Jerry Yang, that he had been inspired by Kapoor's Yahoo song in Junglee.
Underlining his interest in modern technology, he was an almost fanatical enthusiast for using Twitter and designed and updated his own fan club website. He founded the Internet Users Community of India and was a key figure behind the Ethical Hackers' Association. Kapoor is survived by his second wife, Neela, and a daughter and son from his first marriage.
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