The world’s most famous actor and you’ve never heard of him. Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most famous Bollywood actor, is in London for the opening of his latest movie.
When Bachchan falls ill, millions of Indians do penance. In 1982 he injured himself in a stunt scene and fell into a coma. “Some 80-year-old women said they ate only one meal a day and would sleep on the ground, praying for my recovery,” he says. “One chap who lived 400km from Mumbai ran backwards from his village to the city and then backwards home again, a total of 800km.”
Bachchan is in Britain for the launch of his film Baabul. Certainly there is no British actor alive who shares his fame. He is Tom Cruise, Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood rolled into one. And Chris Tarrant. He has been hosting (though is due to leave) the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, drawing a breathtaking 250m viewers. In a BBC online poll in 2000 he beat Laurence Olivier to be voted the greatest actor of the millennium; and yet most people in the West have never heard of him, though the Mumbai-based Bollywood industry churns out more than 1,000 films a year.
He is an ambassador for the International Indian Film Academy, an annual Oscars-style event to reward excellence in the Indian movie industry. It has become so popular that Dubai, New York and Amsterdam made bids to hold next year’s event. It is significant, perhaps, that it will be held in Yorkshire.
On his recent trip to the UK for the IIFA inauguration he also found time to meet Gordon Brown, who gave him a book about Nelson Mandela. “With the large influx of Asians into Britain, it’s almost like being home,” he says.