“They are all going one by one,” Amitabh Bachchan sighs, mourning the loss of his dear friend Dharmendra. “We didn’t meet often. But whenever we did, the warmth was exactly the same as it was fifty years ago when we worked together. Most of us try to be good human beings. He was genuinely a good person. You could see it in that disarming smile he had for everyone.”
Mr. Bachchan remains deeply indebted to Dharmendra. “He got me Sholay. When I first heard about the project, I was very keen to be part of it. Dharamji had already been signed. I requested him to put in a word for me—and he did. That’s how I became part of the biggest film ever made.”
In fact, Bachchan’s journey into superstardom began because of Dharmendra—quite literally. “That’s right. I got my first hit Zanjeer after Dharamji rejected the part. There is so much I have to be grateful for,” he says.
Zanjeer was the first of seven films Amitabh Bachchan went on to collaborate on with director Prakash Mehra. It became a historic turning point: it resurrected the careers of Salim–Javed, redefined the Hindi film screenplay, and transformed Bachchan into the nation’s ‘Angry Young Man’. It was a film with no comedy track, no songs for the hero, and not even a smile from him—yet it became a landmark.
At the time Zanjeer was being developed, everything that Salim–Javed considered its USP was regarded as a risk. Many actors turned it down. Dharmendra was the first actor the film went to, but he was bound by a promise: an aunt he was very close to had serious differences with Prakash Mehra and made Dharmendra vow never to work with him. He honoured that promise all his life.
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