Prem Chopra is a name in the Hindi film industry that reverberates as one of the most evil and dangerous villains ever portrayed on celluloid. The talented actor rose to fame by being the recurrent antagonist in most of Rajesh Khanna’s films, such as Doli, Upkaar, Do Raaste, Ajnabee, Souten among others. His iconic tagline, ‘Prem naam hai mera… Prem Chopra’ became a historical marker of his presence in the cinema world. However, the real Prem Chopra beyond the celluloid was nowhere close to the bad-guy characters that he portrayed. Nevertheless, his bad-guy image did take a toll on various aspects of his personal life.
In an interview with Bollywood Thikana, Prem Chopra retrospected how his career in the films as a top-notch villain tainted his personal life. He highlighted how back in those days, people used to actually blur the lines between reel and real and would be afraid by the sight of him. Moreover, he also recalled a moment when his own father, got irked and was taken aback, as he witnessed people’s reaction on seeing his son back at home. He mentioned:
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“I’d gone to meet my father in Chandigarh once. There’s a Panchkula garden in Chandigarh, and we would go there to walk. This one time, we noticed four or five men approaching us from the other side. They recognised me, and started saying, ‘Hide the women, hide the women, Prem Chopra is coming’. My father was surprised by the reputation my characters had created of me.”
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In the same interview, Prem Chopra spoke about how earlier, the fact that villains needed to enact scenes of rape and molestation on-screen were quite common, and those were actually considered pivotal to the plot of the film. However, he also revealed that those scenes were never just planned for the sake of it. In his words:
“I did a few films with rape scenes, films like Laat Saheb and Jheel Ke Us Paar, but those scenes were necessary to the plot. We never had such scenes for the sake of it.”
For the unversed, Prem Chopra shares a family bonding with the Kapoor clan of Bollywood. Well, Prem’s wife, Uma Chopra happens to be the sister of Raj Kapoor’s wife, Krishna Kapoor. She had found Prem to be the perfect match for her sister, Uma and so, she urged her husband to initiate the talks about the same with Prem Chopra. While at first, Prem was hesitant to agree, after a couple of meetings with Uma, he fell in love with her and the duo got married in 1969.
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In one of his earlier interviews with The Times Of India, Prem Chopra revealed whether he felt hesitant doing villainous roles on-camera. To this, the talented artist proclaimed himself to be a devil on-screen, and thus he was never nervous. Moreover, he recalled several actresses would often turn up coy before him, but only a few trained actresses would finally be able to nail the role.
What do you think about Prem Chopra’s revelations? Let us know.
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