The biggest star in the world

10/06/2011

Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan commands the kind of global adoration Brit celebs can only dream of...

Question: Who is the world's most famous living actor?

A - Johnny Depp
B - Robert De Niro
C – Jackie Chan
D - Amitabh Bachchan

Would you like to ask the audience? Take 50:50? For fans of Bollywood, the world's largest film industry, Amitabh Bachchan is a living legend, known to hundreds of millions simply as 'Big B.'

India's equivalent of Elvis Presley, Al Pacino and Chris Tarrant rolled into one, the 68-year-old actor achieved superstardom in the 1970s as Bollywood's 'angry young man' and has since made over 200 movies in a career stretching four decades.

Voted 'Star of the Millennium' by a BBC poll, beating Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and even Homer Simpson to the title, Bachchan is the patriarchal figure of Indian cinema whose worldwide viewership is one billion people larger than Hollywood's.

A melting pot of melodrama, action, song and dance – but very little kissing – Bollywood releases around 1000 movies annually and its audience is mushrooming across Asia, Africa and the Middle East where cinemagoers who are strangers to Captain Jack and James Bond feel like friends of Big B.

While starring in at least five films every year, Bachchan still finds time to present India's most popular television show, Kaun Banega Crorepati (India's Who Wants to be a Millionaire?), and talk to The Big Issue.

But firstly, he'd like to discuss the term Bollywood.

"It's a little demeaning to the Indian film industry," he says with the authoritative voice of a national treasure who takes issue with the Hindi film industry constantly being compared – often derogatorily - to its American cousin. "The name Bollywood is best left to time immemorial."

Bachchan speaks slowly, with authority and purpose, the voice that made him a star and has brought him to Britain where he is launching his pioneering vocal blogging – or vogging – project, 'Bachchan Bol'.

Bachchan has embraced the internet as a vital tool to stay connected with his fans.

"I write a blog every day," he explains. "I've been on Twitter for almost a year, and when this company came up to me with the idea of using my voice to speak out and talk to fans and well-wishers, I found it very fascinating.

"It is an extension of what I was doing on the blog," he continues. "You can write your thoughts but it's very difficult to write expression. How wonderful if people who read your blog were to be able to have the facility and opportunity to actually get an expression to it."

Bachchan's blog attracts thousands of hits every day, but in a country where there are ten mobile phone users for every internet user, starting an audio diary made perfect sense.

"It's a great facility to connect the people and make them feel like they're sitting with you while you're on set or at home, relaxing or travelling somewhere, regarding the scenery, whatever it is."

Launched in India early last year, 'Bachchan Bol' already boasts 2.6 million subscribers, who Bachchan considers as an extended family.

Bachchan owes his fans not just for his success, fame and riches, but for his life. When he was critically injured on the set of Coolie in 1982 the country came to a standstill. Thousands of fans held vigil outside his Bombay hospital as millions more around the prayed in temples or fasted to speed his recovery. Many offered to sacrifice their own limbs and one devotee ran from Baroda to Bombay to pray for him – 280km – backwards all the way.

Bachchan recovered and became a one man megabrand. He moved into business, briefly served in the Indian parliament and is head of Hindi cinema's greatest dynasty, his son Abhishek Bachchan marrying former Miss World Aishwarya Rai to become India's version of Brangelina. When Bachchan fell ill again in 2005, it was reported that his stay in hospital was delaying projects worth £0.69 billion.

More than a movie star, he is a national icon who Rachel Dwyer, a Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at the University of London, lauded as "a great communicator of moral sentiment" who does more for India on an international level than the Taj Mahal, curry and the Kama Sutra.

And yet, to Western cinema audiences, he might be best known from a fleeting appearance in Danny Boyle's Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire. Bachchan is the actor arriving by helicopter who the young Jamal crawls through sewage to meet.

Though he only appears in archive film clips, Amitabh Bachchan becomes Jamal's first answer on his route through Who Wants to be a Millionnaire? - a nod to the fact he was the original presenter of its Indian incarnation of the programme.

Slumdog Millionaire focussed the spotlight on Hindi cinema as never before, however Bachchan is reticent about its success.

"It didn't do as well in India as it did in the rest of the world," he says. "A film like that did well in the West because they were unaware of what the country was. But the story of the film was very normal as far as Indian films are concerned.

"Escapism is an essential element of our films. We are over one and a quarter billion people. Every sixth person in the world is an Indian. Not all of them are wealthy enough to go to other places of entertainment so we have to cater for a taste which is universal throughout the country, and for a country as diverse as India it becomes essential therefore to work on a line which is not too obtuse."

The same attributes that appeal to audiences from all over the world have made Hindi films an increasingly familiar presence in British multiplexes, and Bachchan believes that even the language difference should be no barrier.

"The whole concept of cinema is that it is universal," he says." It doesn't need a language."

Icon of cinema, television, music, business, politics and the internet, who else but Big B would launch a revolutionary telephone service that allows fans to stay connected to their idol?

The world's most famous actor? Phone a friend.

To subscribe to Bachchan Bol text BBOL to 85525