Shammi Kapoor

1931–2011

Shammi Kapoor spent six years failing as a conventional leading man and then, with Tumsa Nahin Dekha in 1957, invented something else entirely: a hero who moved. The dancing was unchoreographed, the delivery was comic, and the effect on Hindi cinema was immediate.

Junglee, Kashmir Ki Kali, Teesri Manzil and An Evening in Paris are the run he is remembered for, almost all of them sung by Mohammed Rafi, who learned to sing the way Shammi Kapoor moved. He put on weight, moved to character parts in the 1970s, and spent his later years as one of the first Indians on the internet, running the country's earliest ISP user group.