Mithun Chakraborty - The superstar who gave up too soon

In my opinion, Mithun Chakraborty is the most enigmatic superstar of Bollywood. His choice of movies have oscillated between best to worst. The 3 time National Award winner has some great Bengali movies in his kitty and at the same time some very atrocious movies too and somewhere in between are his conventional commercial Bollywood movies which made him the star he is.

Mithun' s struggle and rags to riches story is really inspiring and it is very surprising that someone who with such a fighting spirit overcame his struggles and become one of the country's biggest superstars largely wasted his potential and could have done much much more.

After grabbing a National Award in his debut movie Mrigya, the next few years till 1982 he mostly starred in small movies and quite a few of them were successes too especially Suraksha. Till Disco Dancer happened,he was seen not seen as an A Lister. Disco Dancer in 1982 however catapulted him to stardom and from 1982 to 1987 he was the top actor of the country. His stardom was also helped by the fact that from 1984 to 1987 Amitabh Bachchan was not very active due to him moving to politics for few years after the demise of Indira Gandhi. But at the same time a new crop of actors like Anil Kapoor, Sunny Deol, Jackie Shroff and Sanjay Dutt had also come up and giving him stiff competition plus the old timers like Dharmendra, Jeetendra, Vinod Khanna and Rishi Kapoor were also around and he faced competition from them too.

The most notable fact of Mithun's stardom is the fact that he made big despite working in largely sub standard movies. Most of his movies had similar plots without much novelty and looked like assembly line productions and neither he worked with any big directors of that era like Yash Chopra or Subhash Ghai. He did work with some immensely successful old timers like Manmohan Desai and Ramesh Sippy but at that time they were in the twilight of their careers.

The fact that he made it without any big directors or high quality content movies speaks volumes about his stardom and his connect with the masses which exists till date. It shows that he could lift those movies and make them successes purely because of his strong screen presence, charm and connect with the audience. Getting the audience to the theatres to watch the similar stuff again and again meant that they came to watch the star and not the movie. This is the biggest test for any star i.e.to lift even the average movies with their own star power and connect with the audience.

However, with time and quantity taking over quality (he had 19 releases in 1989) coupled with changing audience tastes his stardom was bound to suffer. He himself is however largely responsible for it because he did not change with times and didnt' work with new/good directors and stuck to his gang which included names like B.Subhash, Shibu Mitra, K. Bapayya and others.

He did make a brief comeback in 1993 with three hits ( again all of them were very average movies ) and continued to act in the mainstream Bollywood movies till 1996 post which she shifted base to Ooty and did only a bunch of B Grade movies. This phase of his career from 1998- 2004 is also very interesting in some ways. Contrary to perception of many, he was not making flops during this period.

During his B Grade movie phase from 1998-2004, where he churned out 4-5 movies every year he made a lot of money as a businessman if not as a movie actor. He adopted a very smart model, the whole cast and crew stayed at his hotel in Ooty and they shot mainly in and around Ooty with staple set of actors. These movies made with a very tight budgets and were sold at a reasonable cost to all the distributers and many of them made profits and even the ones which did not make money did not make much losses either on account of tight budgets.

Finally, better sense prevailed and he came to mainstream Bollywood and gave some very good performances like the ones in Guru  and simultaneously starred in conventional blockbusters like Golmaal 3 and Housefull 2 and continues to entertain us till date. He has largely wasted his potential but one should still hope that even at a age of 71 he can still turn it around and surprise us with some incredible performances