M. G. R. won his first assembly seat campaigning from a hospital bed
In January 1967 a fellow actor shot Tamil film star M. G. Ramachandran during a meeting about a movie. He survived with a permanently altered voice, fought that year's election from hospital and won. A decade later he was chief minister of Tamil Nadu, a post he held until his death in 1987.
Ramachandran was born on 17 January 1917 in Nawalapitiya, in what was then British Ceylon, to a Malayali family from the Palakkad region. His father, a magistrate in Kandy, died when the boy was two and a half, and his mother moved to Kumbakonam and worked as a housemaid to keep her two sons in school. He joined a touring drama troupe called Boys Company, even playing female roles on trips to Rangoon and Singapore, and made his screen debut in 1936 in Sathi Leelavathi, directed by the American-born Ellis R. Dungan.
Stardom took more than a decade. Action films from 1950 made him a matinee idol, and he became one of the three leading men of Tamil cinema. He starred in the industry's first full-length Gevacolor film in 1955, directed and produced a blockbuster in 1958, and his role in Rickshawkaran earned him India's national prize for best actor. In 1960 he turned down the Padma Shri because the invitation came in Devanagari script, a stance in keeping with his Tamil and Dravidian convictions.
Politics ran alongside the films. He left Congress in 1953 for C. N. Annadurai's DMK and rose on his popularity. After Annadurai died, friction with the new leader, Karunanidhi, grew; in 1972 Ramachandran accused the party of corruption, demanded ministers declare their assets and was expelled. Within days he was leading the new AIADMK, using cinema to spread its message. The 1967 shooting cost him hearing in his left ear, and a fragment of the bullet was only removed later, once it shifted safely; the attacker, actor M. R. Radha, was jailed for five years.
His AIADMK alliance took 144 of 234 seats in 1977, and apart from a four-month gap in 1980 he governed until he died on 24 December 1987, after years of illness linked to diabetes-related kidney failure. He is buried on Chennai's Marina beach, received the Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1988, and Chennai Central railway station bears his name.
Source: M. G. Ramachandran
