This Bollywood villain ran away from home to become an actor, slept in gutters, gave back to back flops at the start of his career.
Just like a charming heroes, a strong villain is a must to make a film box office success. Audience wait for a tough fight between the hero and the villain. Today many heroes are opting for the role of villain and garnering success. One such actor was in the 60s-70s who went on to be Bollywood's top villain from a romantic hero.
The actor we are talking about was an outsider who not only made his place in the industry but also in the hearts of the audience. He ran away from home to become an actor and later became the top villain. He is none other than Ajit Khan.
Ajit Khan as born as Hamid Ali Khan into a Deccani Muslim family of Hyderabad state near the historic fort of Golconda outside Hyderabad city. The family belonged to the Barozai clan of Pashtuns. His father was a personal driver of Nizam of Hyderabad Mir Osman Ali Khan. He ran away from home to pursue acting and sold his college books to arrange the funds for his travel.
However, when he reached Mumbai, he didn't have any place to stay and thus he resported to staying in the cement pipes in gutters. At that time, the local goons used to collect money from those who stayed in those pipes. However, Ajit refused to give them money which led to a huge fight between them and after he won the fight, everybody started giving him food for free.
His son Shehzad Khan talked about his father's struggling days and revealed in an interview, "He showed me a gutter near Mohammed Ali Road and said that when he came to Mumbai from Hyderabad, he would sleep in those gutters." Initally in his career, Ajit worked as an extra to feed himself. His first few movies as the lead actor failed at the box office. He then changed his name to Ajit, but his luck at the box office still didn't work. However, he did gain a lot of popularity because of his persoanlity.
It was only in 1950 that starred in K. Amarnath's Beqasoor in which he acted with Madhubala, that turned out to be one of the biggest hits of 1950. He then starred in a number of films like Nastik, Bada Bhai, Milan, Baradari and Dholak. However, he then had to play second-lead in films like Naya Daur and Mughal-e-Azam.
Ajit's son Shehzaad also revealed that Ajith had no work after Naya Daur for 4-5 years. He told Siddharth Kanan, "His bad time started after Naya Daur. He didn’t have any work for 4-5 years, Heroes were insecure that if we work with him, he’ll take the awards and we won’t get recognised."
However, later he starred in Suraj as the antagonist and then things took the right turn for him. This was followed by playing the antgonist in films like Amitabh Bachchan's Zanjeer and Yaadon Ki Baaraat. After this he never looked back and became the top villain of Bollywood. His famous dialogues included the "Mona darling" bit in Yaadon Ki Baraat, "Lily don't be silly" in Zanjeer. In mid-seventies he acted in over 57 films mostly as villain and in his career he worked in over 200 films with many actors like Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra Prithviraj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar along with others. Ajit passed away due to a massive heart attack on 22 October 1998 in Hyderabad, India at the age of 76.
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 "Ajit Khan (Source: Screengrab)")
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