Rishi Kapoor, not your typical Hindi film hero

If you’re growing up in the 1980s, a boy in love with Hindi cinema’s macho heroes, you can be forgiven for being less than enamoured of Rishi Kapoor. Of course, Rishi Kapoor did so much in the 1970s and 1980s, across genres, that it was impossible not to sit up and take notice, even if he wasn’t your preferred “hero” type. Glancing through his filmography is to be reminded that he was an essential presence in many different types of films: from his effortlessly lithe musical performances in Karz and Hum Kisise Kam Nahin to one of his few truly offbeat films of that period, Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Ek Chaadar Maili Si, to the thriller Khoj, where he more than held his own against Naseeruddin Shah in an exciting verbal joust that builds to the climactic denouement. Looking back on his work during that time, it’s interesting to consider how often he seems to be a silent or passive presence, or how often we see the character he plays in relation to someone else – from the boy watching his teacher, Simi Garewal, undressing by the lake in Mera Naam Joker, to the adult looking at Dimple Kapadia by the sea in Saagar. After a long gap in the 1990s and early 2000s, where he did little of note, Kapoor famously found a second innings, playing roles that his fan base of two decades earlier would have found it hard to imagine him in – from the pedantic movie producer in Luck By Chance to the sleazy Rauf Lala in the Agneepath remake, the middle-class Lajpat Nagar teacher in Do Dooni Chaar, or the Dawood Ibrahim-like gangster in D-Day, launching into a colourful monologue at the film’s end, and using an explosive profanity that one would never have expected to see from the Chintu baba of old.