From angry young man to cool old gentleman, 50 years of Amitabh Bachchan

From playing the angry young man in the 1970s to the cool old gentleman in recent years, Amitabh Bachchan has extended his superstardom more than anyone before him.

Precisely at six one evening in 1969, young Amitabh Bachchan — recognisable then only from the headshots he had been sending around — arrived to meet Khwaja Ahmad Abbas in Mumbai. The director had assumed the aspiring actor was a local but he had travelled from Calcutta. He left behind a handsome job there, Rs 1,600 a month, to make that appointment because “one has to take such chances”. In a Nehru jacket and churidar, his six-foot-two-inch frame looked further elongated, a picture that had fazed some filmmakers. “They all said I was too tall for their heroines,” he is