When a list of the world's richest actors was published last year, the usual suspects appeared in its upper reaches: Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp and Clint Eastwood can all call on at least US$370 million (Dh1.36 billion) of personal fortune when times get tough. But above all those bankable names of Hollywood was one man who has changed the global face of Hindi cinema. Shah Rukh Khan, the star of Ra.One, Chennai Express and Devdas (the first Bollywood film to be shown at Cannes), is the second richest actor in the world after Jerry Seinfeld. No wonder they call him "King Khan".
So this intriguing 48-year-old Indian is unlikely to feel any pressure about following up the success of his record-breaking action-comedy Chennai Express, by most measures the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever, until Dhoom 3 succeeded it late last year. His new film Happy New Year had its premiere in Dubai this week – coinciding with Diwali, naturally – and there will once again be huge interest in Khan's next move. Not least because much of the movie was shot in Dubai, a city that he's grown to love so much he now owns $65m worth of its real estate. "I feel the energy when I come here," he once said.
It’s fair to say that Khan rarely misses a trick when it comes to his film career. Cleverly, the premiere was at one of Dubai’s most iconic buildings – Atlantis, The Palm, where the film is largely based. SRK’s fame has dovetailed neatly with the rise of Dubai and Bollywood’s international appeal, which made the UAE setting a natural fit.
Khan is savvy enough to understand that his fan base might not all live in the height of Dubai luxury. In August, he endorsed a Dh2.3bn property development in Dubai Investment Park. What this “brand ambassador” said at the launch said everything about his everyman appeal. “My contribution was the wish that it should be affordable town houses,” he said. “It should be something belonging to the world where I belong. I am a lower-middle-class guy.”
Despite his $600m fortune – which he has accrued over a 50-film career – Khan's man-of-the-street charm is what has captured his audience. This isn't a man who had any truck with the dynastic constrictions of Bollywood. His was a tricky childhood in the Rajendra Nagar district of Delhi: his father died when Khan was 15 and the family transport business collapsed before being built back up by his mother. "We had a lot of issues in terms of money," he admitted at, tellingly, an event held by Forbes Middle East to acknowledge the top Indian leaders in the Arab world. "But I saw my parents work very hard to educate me."
It was during this period that Khan's interest in the stage really began, enrolling at Hansraj College to read economics, but actually spending most of the time at Barry John's Theatre Action Group in Delhi. Although he has said that he didn't really grow up wanting to be an actor, his first public break came in the 1989 television series Fauji, where he played a cadet in the Indian army. He loved it – and audiences loved his straightforwardness. As The Guardian would marvel many years later: "His very ordinariness has won over his audience, who see him almost like them, as has his on-screen cheekiness. It often seems as if he is winking at filmgoers, admitting his latest vehicle is no masterwork."
That column was written in 2007, when his reincarnation/romance film Om Shanti Om had just enjoyed the biggest opening week in Indian history. Khan, though, might agree with The Guardian. Just after Chennai Express had been released, he said of Bollywood: "An actor [can't] just be someone trained in the art of acting, but in the art of dancing, in the art of having fun. [Someone who is] saying: 'You know what? We're entertainers and we need to do everything we are called upon to do.'"
Which certainly rings true as far as Happy New Year is concerned. Watching Khan try to explain the plot in interviews e is almost squirm-inducing stuff. "It's a heist film and a dance film, the story of five or six people who want to do a heist, but to be able to do that they have to be able to take part in the world dance championship, and it changes their opinion about what they want from life," he says, stumbling slightly. "But yes, it's a fun, happy, comic film."
A far cry from his early years in Bollywood, where he shot to fame playing an anti-hero who murders his girlfriend in Baazigar (1993) and an obsessive lover in Anjaam (1994). The latter might not have been a box-office success, but it did win Khan Filmfare's Best Villain Award. And Khan's risk-taking – perhaps because he didn't have any family tradition to uphold – saw him carve a niche as a versatile actor who would guarantee vibrancy and interest. As the film blogger Arnab Ray once wrote in DNA India, perhaps a little too effusively: "Then he came, sliding down stairs on a slab of ice, cartwheeling, somersaulting, lips trembling, eyes trembling, bringing to the screen the kind of physical energy not seen since Shammi Kapoor in his heyday."
Khan's heart-throb status arrived with his role in one of the biggest-ever Bollywood romantic comedies, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Incredibly, given that it was released in 1995, it's still playing at the Maratha Mandir theatre in Mumbai. There's one reason that Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge has become a modern classic – Khan's performance, which the film critic Anupama Chopra called a "template for modern love, which was hip and cool but resolutely Indian". He'd become, as The Indian Express's Bollywood expert Harneet Singh said, "every mother's dream son, and every girl's dream boyfriend".
Khan recognised that Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge was a turning point: in the director Aditya Chopra's office, there's a poster of the film that Khan has signed: "Thank you for making me the star that I am today." But, if anything, the success of that film swung Khan too firmly into dreamboat territory, casting him as a go-to guy for romantic leads – a role that he struggled to escape from. Still, the proceeds allowed him to set up Red Chillies Entertainment, a film-production-and-distribution company that has been responsible for most of Khan's 21st-century hits. He was becoming much more than just an actor – he was also turning into a fully fledged Indian success story.
Khan is Muslim – “I believe in the tenets of Islam and I believe that it’s a good religion and a good discipline,” he said in 1996. But his wife, Gauri, is a Punjabi Hindu – their three children, as he told the BBC in 2005, “know the value of God”, with idols of Hindu gods next to the Quran. In the same interview, he also said “my life may seem glamorous from the outside, but off-screen it’s as ordinary as anyone else’s. I want people to know that movie stars live a normal, middle-class life.”
There was that middle-class claim again. With his $600m fortune amassed as much from a staggering array of endorsements as films – he’s been the face of everything from Pepsi to Hyundai and Tag Heuer – his protests of normality might stick in the throat somewhat. He lives in a huge mansion in Mumbai, has six bodyguards and displays all the trappings of a man with immense wealth: he part-owns the current Indian Premier League champions Kolkata Knight Riders, has often been seen around the Force India Formula 1 team and has confessed he “loves being a star”.
Perhaps it’s better to say that he remembers what it’s like to live a normal life. Certainly his humanitarian work suggests that connection hasn’t been lost. When it was leaked that Khan had paid for the treatment of two Kashmiri orphans burnt in a terrorist attack, it transpired that he’d been anonymously donating to a hospital for nine years. And his work with polio, Aids, water and education charities in India and beyond has seen Khan using his name and status to raise awareness.
It'll be fascinating to see how "Brand SRK" develops in the future as Khan's various interests compete for attention. As he told The Guardian in 2006, when aspersions about his status as a leading man were first being made: "I'm wealthy because I work fast and earn fast. I don't sit back." He certainly doesn't.
weekend@thenational.ae
• See Sunday’s edition of Arts&Life for an interview with Shah Rukh Khan, a review of Happy New Year and all the red-carpet gossip from the film premiere
Follow us @LifeNationalUAE
Follow us on Facebook for discussions, entertainment, reviews, wellness and news.
