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From 'Sholay' to 'Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani,' Here Are Five of Dharmendra's Most Iconic Films
Dharmendra began his career with the 1960 film 'Dil Bhi Tera Hum Bhi Tere.' His next on-screen appearance will be in 'Ikkis' set to release on Christmas
Legendary actor Dharmendra, one of the definitive male leads of Indian cinema, the Veeru of Sholay and the ‘He-Man’ of Bollywood, passed away in Mumbai on Monday, November 24. He was 89.
Born Dharmendra Kewal Krishan Deol in Ludhiana, Punjab, the actor would enter the annals of cinema in his early 20s, and go on to chart a vast and celebrated career, buoyed by his industrial-strength charm and easy beauty on-screen, spanning over six decades, working in more than 300 films, setting the record for delivering the most number of hit films. In 2012, he was honoured with the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour.
Dharmendra began his career with the 1960 film Dil Bhi Tera Hum Bhi Tere. His next on-screen appearance will be in Ikkis, set to release on Christmas.
Dharmendra's Most Iconic Films
Here is a guide to some of his most iconic films, with some off-center suggestions to give a sense of his range, and the span of his career.
The Hrishikesh Mukherjee Films
Primarily a father-daughter film, Anupama (1966) has Dharmendra’s character poignantly nudging the daughter (Sharmila Tagore) out of her shackles. While he received raves for his performance in this film, Dharmendra believed Mukherjee’s Satyakam (1969), where he struggles between the dichotomy of idealism and practicality, to be the strongest role of his career. In a 1998 Filmfare interview calling Dharmendra his favourite hero, Mukherjee said, “By favourite actor, I didn’t mean just his acting talent. I meant the human being also. I cast Dharmendra as a professor in Chupke Chupke. He was also in Satyakam, the most satisfying film I’ve made.”
Together, they also made the comedy Chupke Chupke (1975), the family drama Majhli Didi (1967). Dharmendra even played a fictionalised version of himself in Guddi (1971).
Sholay (1975)
What can one say about the film that hasn’t been said already? Iconic for plenty reasons—its sleek action, the censorship battles, its rousing success, capturing the imagination of a nation and the mood of a trying decade—Sholay starred Dharmendra with Amitabh Bachchan in one of Indian cinema's greatest pairings. Yet the film, shot on location in Karnataka, also cemented the love of Dharmendra and Hema Malini. In 1973, the pair delivered five hits together, establishing them as a successful on-screen star pair. Sholay would raise the stakes. Dharmendra, a married man, through the shoot tried wooing Hema Malini, who was being courted by a litany of other men, and kept under the strict gaze of her mother. Dharmendra had his ways. When he had scenes with Hema Malini, he would pay the light boys to mess up the lighting so he could embrace her again and again. Dharmendra and Hema Malini married in 1980 and have two daughters.
Adventures of Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves (1980)
Dharmendra’s charm leaked beyond the Indian borders. An Indo-Soviet film based on the Arabian Nights story of the same film, directed by Soviet director Latif Faiziyev and Indian director Umesh Mehra, it was one of the most successful Indian-Soviet co-productions.
Film scholar Masha Salazkina writes, “[T]he figure of Ali Baba as a good-hearted simpleton—Dharmendra’s trademark of the 1970s, which was a transposition of his roles in the “socials” of the 1960s, such Anupama (Hrishikesh Mukherjee, 1966)—resonated with the Russian folk tradition of a simple peasant hero, linking the two film iconographies.”
The Kanti Shah Films
The 1990s was a despairing decade for Dharmendra. In fact, it is often written off. But it was in the 1990s that Dharmendra took over the mantle of Dara Singh among the small town masses, while his contemporaries, Vinod Khanna, Jeetendra, and Shatrughan Singh had fallen out of the limelight.
While this decade opened up Indian cinema to a new kind of hero—the polished, genteel, chocolate boy—on the other hand, there were Kanti Shah’s films, many starring Dharmendra. These films were made, as The Hindu reported, “with shooting schedules of just around a month… at a shoe-string budget, at times ridiculously low sum of Rs.40 lakh…always recover[ing] their money, and ma[king] a lot of it over and above the cost. They all came in unannounced, no satellite promos, no special talk shows by artists, not even those gigantic hoardings one used to see at the traffic intersections in the years past.”
There was Veer (1995), Loha (1997), Munnibai (1999), and Aaj Ka Gunda (2001). While considered B and C grade films, these cemented Dharmendra’s mofussil appeal at a time when they were forgotten by the mainstream gaze.
Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023)
Perhaps, then, to star in a Karan Johar film, the precise kind of movie that pushed him off the pedestal in the 1990s was a sweet circling back for Dharmendra. Playing Kanwal Lund, the grandfather of the titular hero, his character did not recede into the background, in fact strengthening the love of the lead pair with his parallel love story. It was nostalgic, but also energetic—not the kind of performance that leans so heavily on the past it forgets to chart a future.