The Iconic Rishi Kapoor...
Rishi Kapoor, the icon of romance, passed away after having suffered a two-year battle with leukaemia. He left for heavenly abode on April 30, 2020. He was loved for his jovial and larger-than-life persona. He was passionate about films, food, and people. Rishi Kapoor’s demise is the second blow to the film industry in succession after actor Irrfan Khan’s death on 29 April 2020.
Kapoor is survived by wife Neetu Kapoor, and children Ranbir Kapoor and Riddhima Kapoor Sahni.
All through the 1970s and 80s he kept setting the hearts flutter with his musical romances and the trademark dance moves in many a catchy film song.
For a young man bequeathed with the enviable Kapoor blood and genes, Rishi was born into acting. The evidence of which was for all to see in his debut itself. Not the song ‘Pyaar hua, iqraar hua’ in his legendary father Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955), when he was barely three, but as the young Raju later in Mera Naam Joker (1970). It was a complicated role, of a boy’s deep infatuation with his schoolteacher (played by Simi Garewal) and he brought alive the pain and anxieties of unattainable love well enough to bag the National award for the best child artiste.
It was the following film, again by his father, Bobby (1973), a quintessential Bollywood romance, that unleashed him, along with Dimple Kapadia, as heartthrobs of the nation. The film came to form a new template of rebellious love. It was a love across class barriers, a love in which eloping was a way of making a grand statement against societal constrictions.
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Ramesh Talwar's Doosra Aadmi (1977) looked at the tantalising possibility of a young man-older woman relationship. He played a man, forced by tradition, to marry his widowed sister-in-law Hema Malini in Sukhwant Dhada's Ek Chadar Maili Si (1986), which was adapted from a Rajendra Singh Bedi novella. Raj Kapoor's Prem Rog (1982) made a progressive call for widow remarriage. But Rishi was stuck with the identity of a lover boy in trademark colourful sweaters and mufflers singing and dancing with the lady love against fetching backdrops, in the hills, by the sea and often abroad where the audience could live vicariously.
He transitioned seamlessly into character roles and films made by a new brigade of filmmakers. From Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance (2009) to Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi 6 (2009), from Nikhil Advani’s D-Day (2013) to Atul Sabharwal’a Aurangzeb (2013) and more recently as the lascivious grandfather in Shakun Batra’s Kapoor and Sons (2016) and patriarch with a secular heart in Anubhav Sinha's Mulk (2018).
Aamir Khan rightly quoted him as “100 percent a child of cinema.” This child of cinema has left an indelible mark in the hearts and minds of those who had grown up watching his movies engulfed with youthful musical romances.