The BUZZ Master of reinvention

Chocolate hero. Bad guy. Dad roles. Rishi Kapoor did them all, and with aplomb.

Born in Bollywood’s first family long before nepotism debates, Rishi Kapoor announced his arrival with a National Award as Best Child Artiste in Mera Naam Joker (1970). Three years later when his father Raj Kapoor launched him as lead actor in teenybopper romance Bobby, the ‘chocolate boy’ hero was born.

For nearly three decades after that, he was synonymous with romance. From the lover-boy prankster of Rafoo Chakkar and Khel Khel Mein, and die-hard romantic in

Man. Sure, he get on with the occasional gun-toting antic or filmi dishoom -punch, but that wasn't his image. The audience came to watch him romance, and dance.

Yet, Rishi was quietly reorganising his image with his roles - as much as the restrictive commercial Hindi cinema era, and the sole criterion of success seemed to be visibility. These films, as well as the multi-starrers that he continued doing, helped him stay in the limelight.

By the 2000s, having made a move to supporting roles, Kapoor played the daddy roles in films like Yeh Hai Jalwa and Kuch Khatti Kuch Meethi. Bollywood had changed with the millennium and, just when people started saying that playing the heroine's dad was the first sign of an actor's end, Rishi Kapoor sprung his most glorious twin surprises.

First, he reinvented himself all over again. With the advent of the 2010s, Kapoor moved away from all things nice that had ever defined his image. As the sinister face of evil in Agneepath and D-Day, he was reinventing villainy, in the same way he had redefined the hero all those years agoin Bobby. In a project that was about to take off before he passed, we would have seen him in a completely different avatar yet again: playing de Niro’s role in a Hindi remake of The Intern, alongside Deepika Padukone.

But more interesting was Kapoor's reinvention off screen. He took to social media. When he joined Twitter in January of 2010, people expected just another old Bollywood star, who would spew niceties and knowledge. What they got was a firebrand who would take on any and everybody. Rishi Kapoor, always known to have spoken his mind, found a natural space to let off some steam. Sure, it got him trolled often, but it also did leave social media impressed with his guts.

That streak of guts defines everything he has ever lived for. It is something that resonates in his autobiography Khullam Khulla published in 2017. It is the guts that let the moviestar embrace career changes as smoothly as his mind and spirit took on the fight against cancer head-on.