Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Rajesh Khanna’s performance in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Anand is considered as one of the best performances of the superstar’s career. Fans of Anand still can’t help but shed a tear when his character in the film passes away. The glorious performance that still pierces through one’s heart was shot during one of the busiest phases of Khanna’s career. By his own admission, he was “turning hysterical with work pressure.”
In Yasser Usman’s book on the life of the actor, Rajesh Khanna: The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar, Khanna has been quoted as saying that he was overworked because he just couldn’t say no to anyone who offered him a film. He reportedly told Bhawana Somaaya for her book Echoes of an Era, “I got a sore throat telling everyone I couldn’t sign more new films, but nobody cared and nobody listened… Now I had films by kilos and no dates. I was being criticised for being overworked, for being disorganized, for being greedy. I wasn’t any of these. My problem was that I didn’t know how to say ‘no’… The more fan letters I received the more confused I became. It’s strange, but the true struggle of an actor begins only after success. Because the expectations became too many,” he said while adding, “Nobody knows this, but Anand was shot during the busiest phase of my career.”
The book also mentions that Rajesh Khanna was signed on for Anand for lower than his market price because he was so keen to work with Hrishikesh Mukherjee on the film and was completely taken with the script.
Ramesh Deo, who played Dr Prakash in Anand, recalled that Khanna was perpetually late on the sets of Anand and this would infuriate Hrishi-da but as soon as he saw what the actor did in front of the camera, his anger would just melt away. In a 2012 chat with DNA, Deo was quoted as saying, “Rajesh used to enact the scene so well, that after the scene, Hrishi-da used to say, ‘Tumne itna aacha kam kiya hai, tumhare sau gunah maaf (You have done such good work that all your sins are forgiven).’”
Bollywood over the decades: 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s
Rajesh Khanna’s co-star Seema Deo, who played Suman in the film, also recounted in a 2013 interview with Rediff.com that Khanna wouldn’t even know the lyrics of the song when he was lip-syncing and there would be a prompter sitting next to him. “He couldn’t remember the lyrics of any song, so there would be a prompter sitting on the sets to tell him the lyrics; he would listen to each line and then lip-sync it, but no one realized this,” she said.
The stories of Khanna arriving late on sets were well known at this point and the same happened on Anand as well. Seema recalled in the same interview that for a 9:30 am shift, Khanna would arrive at 2 pm. When Hrishi-da (as Hrishikesh Mukherjee was fondly called) would get upset with him, Khanna would sincerely apologise but still show up late the next day. “Rajesh Khanna caught his ear and promised he would come on time,” she said.
Amitabh Bachchan, who was his co-star in Anand, however, never spoke about Rajesh Khanna’s tardiness but did mention that his stardom was actually global. He mentioned in his blog, “He was simple and quiet. The frenzy and the following he garnered was a sight to behold. In the 1970s era his fans came from Spain to meet him—a most unheard-of occurrence then.”
Anand was reportedly shot in a month’s time and after this film, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Rajesh Khanna worked together in 1972’s Bawarchi, 1973’s Namak Haraam and 1978’s Naukri. Khanna might have turned up late on the sets of Anand, but his excellence in front of the camera impressed Mukherjee enough to trust the actor many times over.
Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.
