In an industry which foists a new deity every Friday, Mithun Chakraborty’s has been a story of resilience. Announced as the recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award on Monday (September 30, 2024), Mithun Chakraborty has never been a prisoner of image. From arthouse to mainstream commercial cinema to even fare meant unabashedly for frontbenchers, he has straddled different genres with consummate ease.
Beginning with Mrinal Sen’s Mrigayaa in 1976, he has probably been the only major actor to make a successful transition from arthouse cinema to commercial potboilers and back. While Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Om Puri and Smita Patil each dabbled with limited success in mainstream cinema after carving out their own niche in parallel cinema, Mithun is the only one to get a good bite of the cherry. In parallel cinema, he has worked with the likes of Mrinal Sen, Buddhadeb Dasgupta and Goutam Ghose, winning three National Awards in the process.
He switched to mainstream fare with the likes of B. Subash, K.C.
Bokadia, Manmohan Desai and Parto Ghosh without a hiccup, giving his fans films like Disco Dancer , Dance Dance , Pyar Jhukta Nahin , Ganga Jumna Saraswati , Agneepath and Dalaal , etc. Director B. Subash’s Disco Dancer got Mithun an international fan following with the film raking it rich in the Soviet Union, Japan and China besides India.
For a few years in the mid-80s, he was the best-known Indian abroad. At a time when Hindi cinema was dominated by Salim-Javed’s �.