Prem Chopra recalls his father’s reaction when a group of men tried to hide their wives from him: ‘Kaisi reputation bana rakhi hai?’

Recalling the story, he said in Hindi, “I’d gone to meet my father in Chandigarh once. There’s a Panchkula garden in Chandigarh, and we would go there to walk. This one time, we noticed four or five men approaching us from the other side. They recognised me, and started saying, ‘Hide the women, hide the women, Prem Chopra is coming’. My father was surprised by the reputation my characters had created of me.”

The veteran actor spoke to the men, and assured them that he was nothing like his on screen persona. Asked about the scenes of violence against women that became so common in the films of that era, the actor said with a laugh, “I did a few films with rape scenes, films like Laat Saheb and Jheel Ke Us Paar, but those scenes were necessary to the plot. We never had such scenes for the sake of it.”

The actor became synonymous with the line, ‘Prem naam hai mera, Prem Chopra‘, which he uttered in Raj Kapoor’s Bobby. In a career spanning over 60 years, he remains best known for playing the antagonist in nearly 20 films starring Rajesh Khanna as the hero.