Amitabh Bachchan

Vocation

Indian film actor, producer, singer and TV host. He first gained popularity in the early 1970s as the "angry young man" of Hindi cinema, and has since appeared in over 180 Indian films in a career spanning more than four decades. Bachchan is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential actors in the history of Indian cinema. So total was his dominance of the movie scene in the 1970s and 1980s that the French director Francois Truffaut called him a "one-man industry". His father, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, was a Hindi poet, and his mother, Teji Bachchan, was a Sikh from Faisalabad (now in Pakistan). Bachchan was initially named Inquilaab, inspired from the phrase made famous during the Indian independence struggle, Inquilab Zindabad, which means "long live revolution". However, at the suggestion of fellow poet Sumitranandan Pant, Harivansh Rai changed the name to Amitabh which means, "the light that will never die." Though his surname was Shrivastava, his father had adopted the pen-name Bachchan (meaning "child-like" in colloquial Hindi), under which he published all his works. It is with this last name that Amitabh debuted in films, and, for all public purposes, it has become the surname of all members of his family. Bachchan's father died in 2003 and his mother in 2007. His mother had a keen interest in theatre and had been offered a role in a film, but preferred her domestic duties. She had some degree of influence in Bachchan's choice of career because she always insisted that he should take the centre stage. Bachchan is married to actress Jaya Bhaduri. The couple have two children, Shweta Nanda and Abhishek Bachchan. Abhishek is also an actor and is married to actress Aishwarya Rai. In 1984, Bachchan took a break from acting and briefly entered politics in support of long-time family friend, Rajiv Gandhi. He contested Allahabad's seat of 8th Lok Sabha against H. N. Bahuguna, former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and won by one of the highest victory margins in general election history (68.2% of the vote). His political career, however, was short-lived: he resigned after three years, calling politics a cesspool. The resignation followed the implication of Bachchan and his brother in the "Bofors scandal" by a newspaper, which he vowed to take to court. Bachchan was eventually found not guilty of involvement in the ordeal. Bachchan made his Hollywood debut in 2013 with The Great Gatsby, in which he played a non-Indian Jewish character, Meyer Wolfsheim. Link to Wikipedia biography