Born Deepak Dhar, Kiran Kumar who adopted his mother’s name Kiran for the screen, was the head boy and captain of the cricket team at his alma mater, Daly College. Even though he grew up far away from Mumbai, kept away from the arc lights by his father, actor Jeevan, showbiz eventually beckoned.

On the advice of Shatrughan Sinha, he joined the Film and Television Institute in Pune, graduating with a gold medal in 1967. In 1971, he made his debut as an actor in KA Abbas’s Do Boond Paani which bagged the Nargis Dutt Award for Best Feature Film on National Integration.

However, the films that followed with him in the lead like Bindya Aur Bandook, Jangal Mein Mangal, Hum Junglee Hain and Aaj Ka Tazaa Khabar didn’t work and having watched his father and uncles, Pran and Ajit, play the antagonist convincingly in film after film, Kiran Kumar switched to playing negative roles.

“I wasn’t too enamored playing the hero and was happy playing the anti-hero,” he confides in senior journalist Roshmila Bhattacharya’s book Bad Men: Bollywood’s Iconic Villains.

It was in Gujarati cinema however that he made his mark, acquiring a cult following over a decade. He worked in 82 films and came to be known as the Amitabh Bachchan of Gujarati cinema.

Journalist Roshmila Bhattacharya | Photo courtesy: PR Team

However, after several superhits, Kiran Kumar began to feel he was stagnating and returned to Mumbai without any idea about what he should be doing next. That’s when Salman Khan’s scriptwriter dad, Salim Khan, who with his writing partner Javed Akhtar had penned blockbusters like Deewaar, Trishul, Seeta Aur Geeta and Sholay, entered the picture.

“I had always been close to Salim sahab who had pushed my dad to send me to Daly College, a boarding school in his hometown Indore. After returning to Mumbai, I got in touch and asked him if there were any roles going.

"He had just written a revenge drama, Falak, and told me that while Jackie Shroff and Mohan Bhandari had already been signed to play the brothers, there was the role of a baddie, Bagga, and suggested I take it up,” informs the actor in the Rupa Books Publication which came out this year in July.

This is Roshmila’s fourth book, after Bad Man, the biography of Gulshan Grover, Matinee Men:  A Journey Through Bollywood and Spooked! Bollywood’s Encounters with the Paranormal. 

Falak, directed by Shashilal K. Nair, opened on April 1, 1988. It flopped, but fortunately for Kiran Kumar, Rakesh Roshan’s family drama Khudgarz, in which his character Sudhir drives a wedge between two friends, Jeetendra’s Amar and Shatrughan Sinha’s Bihari, had released the previous year and was a huge hit.

It marked a triumphant comeback to Bollywood for the actor who went to play some iconic bad men like Lotiya Pathan in Tezaab and Pasha in Khuda Gawah. On October 20, 1953, Kiran Kumar turned 71 and for him the work mode is still on with nine upcoming films, according to IMDB, to add to his previous tally of 468.