An actor who floated freely across diverse creative credos

An elderly woman shivers in the cold. Shakti Singh alias Shaka, a criminal, spots her. The young man takes off his shirt and covers her to protect her from the elements. The act of kindness at the heart of a brief sequence in O P Ralhan’s Phool Aur Patthar, the 1966 film that catapulted Dharmendra to superstardom, became the cornerstone of the masculinity that the actor would embody — bulked-up but benign, solid but soft.

- SAIBAL CHATTERJEE

Dharmendra’s onscreen persona contained contradictions that defied definitions. Alternating between the irrepressible and the vulnerable, the smouldering and the subdued, the handsome actor could charm a bird out of a tree.

Many a Hindi blockbuster, be it an action film, a heist thriller, a war movie, a social drama or a comedy, rode on his broad shoulders all through the 1970s and 1980s. He was never hemmed in by genres or forms.

Dharmendra floated freely across diverse creative credos. He was as much at home with Bimal Roy, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Rajinder Singh Bedi (who directed him in 1973's Phagun) as he was with Prakash Mehra (Samadhi), Manmohan Desai (Dharam Veer) and Nasir Hussain (Yaadon Ki Baarat).

In a career that lasted more than six decades — his final film, Sriram Raghavan’s war drama Ikkis, is scheduled for release on December 25 — he went from macho to malleable, from rugged to romantic, from playful to profound and from pulpy to philosophical across a variety of movies that collectively scripted a sustained success story that was second to none.

Dharmendra’s popularity was indeed enormous. It survived the onslaughts of two megastars who arrived on the scene after the Punjab-born actor had, by the mid-1960s, established himself as one of the most bankable stars of the Hindi movie industry.