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PROFILE: SUNNY DEOL
Brave Heart
Eighteen years into his Bollywood career, India's
last action hero lands his greatest hit ever. The life and times of the
man who has always been Dharmendra Jr.
By Anna M.M. Vetticad in Hyderabad with Sandeep Unnithan
 They
said Sly Stallone was just beefcake until Rocky. So was Schwarzenegger
until Terminator. But although Gadar has set cash registers ringing
across the country, though movie maniacs especially in his native Punjab
are thronging cinema halls even at dawn, Sunny Deol is still not uncorking
the fizz in public.
Tough guy.
Macho Punjabi with the big heart. Yet the heart
is a private place, revealing little behind the brooding look and the
polite smile. The last place you would have expected to find an enigma
is in the personality of Gadar's hero. He is unwilling to let us
speak to near relatives: from the secluded Ramoji Film City on the outskirts
of Hyderabad, where he is shooting for director Harry Baweja's Karz,
Deol issues clear instructions to his secretary in Mumbai that we are
not to be allowed access to his mother, sisters or wife. But reticent
actor though he is, he still says thrice during the course of this unusually
long two-day meeting, "I hope you will give this story a lot of space."After
Gadar, and 18 years of Bollywood, Deol need not worry about space
now. But the space he has inherited is the position Dharmendra has left
vacant: as India's last action hero. At nearly 44, the man who's often
said to be plain Dharam Jr, is aware that Gadar has held its own
against the rival period opus, Aamir Khan's Lagaan. Critics calling
Gadar crude cinema in comparison with Khan's bothers him perhaps
as much as the continued question marks over his acting skills despite
two national awards. His father too was considered a lesser star than
Rajesh Khanna and later, Amitabh Bachchan. Like him, Deol has always been
considered a safe bet by producers and distributors. But the No. 1 label
has been elusive. Although Deol insists that he doesn't care what the
press says, this too hurts.
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BIG
GUN: A still from Deol's forthcoming film, the Kargil-esque Maa
Tujhe Salaam
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"In this industry you have to always blow
your own trumpet," says Dharmendra, now 66, "but when you are
not given even your due, then you withdraw yourself and just let your
work speak." Deol's father is also his icon. Dharmendra has this
story about Deol when he was a child. It was 1961. Star M. Rajan had gone
to visit Dharmendra, the young co-star of his latest film Shola
Aur Shabnam, then staying in a terrace flat in Khar. Seeing him,
the four-year-old child began pacing the flat with the new air gun Dharmendra
had bought him. "I'm going to shoot him. He hit my father in the
film," he snarled when mother Prakash asked what he was doing. The
mother is rarely a topic of conversation, part of the Deol family purdah.
But the anger has always been there, an adjunct to what director Raj Kumar
Santoshi calls "the ideal hero concept-a unique combination of a
vulnerable face and powerful, earthy physique". Dharmendra is Deol's
dominant parental reality: while Santoshi considers Ghayal and Damini
the actor's best performances, he thinks Ghaatak, where Deol's
character breaks down after discovering that his father is terminally
ill with cancer, is one of his single greatest scenes. There are parallels
with Dharmendra in his personal life too. The wife normally lives away
from him while Dimple Kapadia is his discreet muse. One catches a fleeting
glimpse of the beautiful actress at the hotel in Film City. Their 15-year
affair is one of the industry's most open secrets, but don't ask Deol
about it.
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HIT: Deol with Amisha in Gadar |
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Family ties are strong. Deol planned his directorial
debut Dillagi as a gift to his father, but it very nearly broke
the family financially. "We still have to repay debts of a few crores,
but my son is pulling us out of it slowly with his hard work. I'm proud
of him," says Dharmendra. It looks as if he wouldn't have to be worried
about being in hock any more. Deol allows a twinkle into his eyes when
quizzed about his rumoured pre-Gadar asking price of Rs 2 crore.
"This much I can tell you-that figure is way off the mark. I always
ask for the maximum and I refuse to compromise on that because I think
if a newcomer can give me what I'm asking for, then why can't an established
director or producer? Anyway, I had raised my rate just before Gadar,
and now the people who fussed know I'm worth it."
Post-Gadar he reportedly charges Rs 4-5
crore per film. Industry watchers see the inflexibility over price as
one of the many reasons why Deol has managed to rub colleagues the wrong
way ever since he strayed on to the firmament with his acting debut in
Betaab in 1983.
In the post-Hum Aapke Hain Koun (HAHK)
and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai-inspired era of extended wedding videos
and college love, the bombastic, jingoistic Gadar, now one-and-a-half
months since its release, is being touted as the film that could break
the record set by HAHK in the mid-1990s. Pleasant coincidence,
considering that HAHK's predecessor in the record books was Dharmendra's
Sholay. Gadar was sold for an astounding Rs 3 crore in the Delhi-Uttar
Prtadesh territory but distributor Manpreet Chadha says he recovered that
money by the end of the second week.
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