Raj Kapoor turned Chaplin's Tramp into a Hindi film star loved across continents
Born in Peshawar in 1924, Raj Kapoor borrowed the shuffling outsider of Charlie Chaplin and made him Indian. His Tramp-like heroes filled cinemas from the Caribbean to the Soviet bloc, and Time magazine later placed his turn in Awaara among the ten finest screen performances anywhere in the world.
He arrived as Shrishti Nath Kapoor on 14 December 1924, in a family mansion his grandfather owned in the Qissa Khwani Bazaar district of Peshawar, then part of British India. His father, the actor Prithviraj Kapoor, reshaped the family naming, so the boy became Ranbir Raj Kapoor and eventually just Raj. Because Prithviraj kept moving for work during the 1930s, the eldest of six children passed through schools in Dehradun, Calcutta and Bombay.
Screen work began absurdly early. At ten he appeared in Inquilab, released in 1935. His first leading part came in 1947 with Kidar Sharma's romance Neel Kamal, opposite Madhubala and Begum Para, though neither it nor his other releases that year did well. The following year he set up his own company, R. K. Films, and directed Aag, a musical drama that earned only middling box office but good notices. It also introduced audiences to Kapoor and Nargis as a romantic couple on screen.
Chaplin was the model he never hid. Kapoor built wandering, big-hearted characters on the Tramp in Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955), and returned to the figure in Mera Naam Joker in 1970. Awaara and Boot Polish went to Cannes as contenders for the Palme d'Or, and in 2005 Time ranked his Awaara performance in its global top ten. Admirers still call him the Charlie Chaplin of Indian cinema, or simply its greatest showman.
The reach of those films was unusual for Hindi cinema: they made money across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean and the Communist countries of Eastern Europe. At home he collected three National Film Awards and eleven Filmfare Awards. The government gave him the Padma Bhushan in 1971 and, in 1988, the year he died, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's top honour for a life in film. His brothers Shammi and Shashi also became actors, and the wider clan later included the actor Anil Kapoor, a cousin's son.
Source: Raj Kapoor
