Bobby Deol and other Deols

Древняя статья про Саню от 2001 года. Представляет исторический интерес, и про семью тут тоже есть.

They said Sly Stallone was just beefcake until Rocky. So was Schwarzenegger until Terminator.

But although Gadar has set cash registers ringing across the country, though movie maniacs especially in his native Punjab are thronging cinema halls even at dawn, Sunny Deol is still not uncorking the fizz in public. Tough guy.

Macho Punjabi with the big heart. Yet the heart is a private place, revealing little behind the brooding look and the polite smile. The last place you would have expected to find an enigma is in the personality of Gadar's hero.

He is unwilling to let us speak to near relatives: from the secluded Ramoji Film City on the outskirts of Hyderabad, where he is shooting for director Harry Baweja's Karz, Deol issues clear instructions to his secretary in Mumbai that we are not to be allowed access to his mother, sisters or wife.

But reticent actor though he is, he still says thrice during the course of this unusually long two-day meeting, "I hope you will give this story a lot of space."

After Gadar, and 18 years of Bollywood, Deol need not worry about space now. But the space he has inherited is the position Dharmendra has left vacant: as India's last action hero. At nearly 44, the man who's often said to be plain Dharam Jr, is aware that Gadar has held its own against the rival period opus, Aamir Khan's Lagaan.

Critics calling Gadar crude cinema in comparison with Khan's bothers him perhaps as much as the continued question marks over his acting skills despite two national awards. His father too was considered a lesser star than Rajesh Khanna and later, Amitabh Bachchan. Like him, Deol has always been considered a safe bet by producers and distributors. But the No. 1 label has been elusive.

Although Deol insists that he doesn't care what the press says, this too hurts. "In this industry you have to always blow your own trumpet," says Dharmendra, now 66, "but when you are not given even your due, then you withdraw yourself and just let your work speak."

Deol's father is also his icon. Dharmendra has this story about Deol when he was a child. It was 1961. Star M. Rajan had gone to visit Dharmendra, the young co-star of his latest film Shola Aur Shabnam, then staying in a terrace flat in Khar. Seeing him, the four-year-old child began pacing the flat with the new air gun Dharmendra had bought him. "I'm going to shoot him. He hit my father in the film," he snarled when mother Prakash asked what he was doing.

The mother is rarely a topic of conversation, part of the Deol family purdah. But the anger has always been there, an adjunct to what director Raj Kumar Santoshi calls "the ideal hero concept - a unique combination of a vulnerable face and powerful, earthy physique".

Dharmendra is Deol's dominant parental reality: while Santoshi considers Ghayal and Damini the actor's best performances, he thinks Ghaatak, where Deol's character breaks down after discovering that his father is terminally ill with cancer, is one of his single greatest scenes.

There are parallels with Dharmendra in his personal life too. The wife normally lives away from him while Dimple Kapadia is his discreet muse. One catches a fleeting glimpse of the beautiful actress at the hotel in Film City. Their 15-year affair is one of the industry's most open secrets, but don't ask Deol about it.

Family ties are strong. Deol planned his directorial debut Dillagi as a gift to his father, but it very nearly broke the family financially. "We still have to repay debts of a few crores, but my son is pulling us out of it slowly with his hard work. I'm proud of him," says Dharmendra. It looks as if he wouldn't have to be worried about being in hock any more.

Deol allows a twinkle into his eyes when quizzed about his rumoured pre-Gadar asking price of Rs.2 crore. "This much I can tell you - that figure is way off the mark. I always ask for the maximum and I refuse to compromise on that because I think if a newcomer can give me what I'm asking for, then why can't an established director or producer? Anyway, I had raised my rate just before Gadar, and now the people who fussed know I'm worth it."

Post-Gadar he reportedly charges Rs.4-5 crore per film. Industry watchers see the inflexibility over price as one of the many reasons why Deol has managed to rub colleagues the wrong way ever since he strayed on to the firmament with his acting debut in Betaab in 1983.

In the post-Hum Aapke Hain Koun (HAHK) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai - inspired era of extended wedding videos and college love, the bombastic, jingoistic Gadar, now one-and-a-half months since its release, is being touted as the film that could break the record set by HAHK in the mid-1990s.

Pleasant coincidence, considering that HAHK's predecessor in the record books was Dharmendra's Sholay. Gadar was sold for an astounding Rs.3 crore in the Delhi-Uttar Prtadesh territory but distributor Manpreet Chadha says he recovered that money by the end of the second week.

Deol is making hay while Gadar shines. Slammed by critics through the 1980s, his first national award for Ghayal was much-needed manna. The next one came for Best Supporting Actor, as the drunken lawyer in Damini. The awards came even as he struggled with two back surgeries.

Darr, Ghaatak, Border and Ziddi have been hits. Though the box-office has remained lukewarm through much of the late-1990s, his distributors have for long considered him a solid star on whose films they are likely to recover costs even if they are not hits.

Analyst Maithili Rao believes Dillagi showed Deol has a largely unexplored flair for comedy - just like his father, though not with as much breadth. But when it's dancing, both are famous for their two left feet.

His uncle, director Guddu Dhanoa, says the famed Deol lack of dancing talent doesn't matter. Punjab proudly claims him as its own. The crowds don't seem to have noticed that his heroine Amisha Patel looks young enough to be his child in Gadar.

When thousands turned up to watch him during Gadar's location shoots at Amritsar, Pathankot and Ferozepur, director Anil Sharma says, "They never said Sunny was coming. It was always sadda Sunny (our Sunny) or mera pra."

The 5 ft 10.5 inches tall hero sports biceps that can swell to 18 inches after a workout. He's a health freak who does not drink or smoke, never travels without his personal trainer and rarely misses the daily workout. Yet he doesn't sport the sculpted Salman Khan look. For him it's the more hirsute akhara body complete with bulging midriff. He's not ashamed of the belly, but has one clear rule: no photographs on a day when he has not worked out.

But despite the public adulation, Deol the man is as much an enigma as Deol the box-office draw. Schoolmate Karim Morani, who also produced Damini and Arjun, speaks of a shy, emotional child who stayed away from school drama competitions.

Amisha is all gush, "Kaho Na... Pyaar Hai wasn't released when I began shooting for Gadar, yet he never made me feel like a newcomer." Brother Bobby is in complete awe of his "guardian angel". Shooting in Scotland for Barsaat in 1995, Bobby broke his leg after an equestrian accident. Big brother immediately chartered a private jet to fly him down to London and cancelled his own shoots to look after his injured sibling.

Deol's stunt duplicate Yakoob Khan has one refrain, "Sunnysaab achche hain," but has to admit that Sunnysaab did not visit him after he was badly burnt in a room on fire during the shooting of Himmat.

There are huge areas of silence in his life. Wife Pooja, whom he met in the UK while studying to be an actor, is one of many subjects that Deol will not discuss. She is never seen in public. Sons Karan and Rajvir are not to be photographed. There's an unwritten rule in the Deol household: the women will not act.

Being inscrutable is part of his shtick even on the sets of Karz, though when an assistant switches on a fan during a take, he barks, "Us ulloo de patthe ne fan nahin on karna tha (That **** was not supposed to switch on the fan)."

His bark is there when he talks about Yash Chopra too. Ask him if he was in awe of Amitabh Bachchan when working with him, and he asks in turn, "When I have the greatest actor in the world in my house, why would I be in awe of anybody else?"

The label of a shouting machine with perpetually bloodied biceps is not likely to leave him if his forthcoming films are anything to go by: he's a vigilante supercop in Indian, there's also the Kargil-esque drama Maa Tujhe Salaam, and other action adventures. But ask him about the action hero tag that he so hates, and he shoots back, "People talk about action as though there is no acting involved. Then they should call the others dancing stars or romantic stars because all they do is run around trees and romance."

For Sunny Deol, whether as the jailbreaker in Ghayal or Tara Singh roaring at the cowering Pakistan police in Gadar, romancing his audiences may be just a piece of beefcake.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/sunny-deol-the-life-and-times-of-the-man-who-has-always-been-dharmendra-jr/1/230802.html