Favourite all-time female star? Most accomplished actor of all time? The best funny man? Outlook readers vote for their favourites. Namrata Joshi checks out the results.
Outlook’s Bollywood Special this year looks at the very core of commercial cinema—the Hindi film star, the one who makes or breaks a film, box-office records, and people’s hearts, whose appeal is of the moment, and enduring, time-tested and timeless, give or take a bomb or two.
And who better to tell us about it than the Hindi film audience—that unknown, amorphous mass of people who vote with their feet every Friday, first day, first show. We sought them out in Delhi and Mumbai, Lucknow and Jaipur, Bhopal and Chandigarh, and asked them to cast their vote for their favourite star of all time. We had no dearth of names, old or new, starting from post-Independence India. Towering over them all was, of course, the Big B. With 32 per cent of the votes, he won this round of the Big B-srk rivalry; Khan was a distant second with just 14 per cent votes. Big B daughter-in-law Aishwarya pipped yesterday’s diva (though some would dispute that) Madhuri Dixit to the post with 21 per cent votes to the latter’s 18 per cent. Sadly, the great stars of yore seem to have faded from the memories of our moviegoers—Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor figured behind the bland lookalikes of Gen Now.
more
