MGR would not be photographed without his cap. Rajinikanth walks into public grey and bald
M.G. Ramachandran, the star who became Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, would not be photographed without his fur cap, because underneath it he was bald and the audience was not to know.
The man who inherited that place in Tamil Nadu arrives at public functions in a plain kurta or a dhoti, grey, bald, unmade-up, and in no hurry to explain himself. On screen the same man is a permanent thirty-five, with the wig, the dyed beard and the sunglasses that land in his hand in slow motion.
Related to article: He Takes the Wig Off · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Bollywood Hungama · CC BY 3.0
He has never tried to close the gap. That is the whole trick, and it is not a trick.
Two men live in that body and he lets the audience see both. The distance between them is where the devotion collects.
Shivaji Rao Gaekwad
He was born in Bangalore in December 1950, into a Marathi-speaking family, the son of a police constable. His mother died when he was a boy. He worked as a coolie and a carpenter, and then took a job as a conductor with the Bangalore Transport Service.
Related to article: He Takes the Wig Off · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Paulsrajan · CC BY-SA 4.0
The stories from the depot are all about style: the way he tore tickets, the whistle, the flourish. The showmanship was fully formed before a camera ever pointed at him. A friend, Raj Bahadur, paid for him to enrol at the film institute in Madras, which is the sort of debt a person does not finish repaying.
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An outsider in Tamil cinema
K. Balachander put him in Apoorva Raagangal in 1975 in a small part, told him to go and learn Tamil properly, and gave him the name Rajinikanth.
Related to article: He Takes the Wig Off · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Sureshciti · CC BY-SA 3.0
Consider what he was in that industry at that moment. A Kannada and Marathi speaker from another state, dark-skinned in a business that lit its heroes to look fair, working in a film culture whose politics ran on Tamil identity and whose biggest stars had built careers on it.
He spent his first years playing cruel men, often opposite Kamal Haasan, in Moondru Mudichu and 16 Vayathinile. The hero came later.
The gestures
What he invented was not a character but a vocabulary. The cigarette flipped into the mouth, the glasses spun open, the walk, the line delivered to nobody in particular. All of it is imitable, which is the point: a bus conductor’s flourish, scaled up until a whole state could do it.
Related to article: He Takes the Wig Off · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Sureshciti · CC BY-SA 3.0
Baasha in 1995 is the film the fans treat as scripture. Muthu, the same year, became a phenomenon in Japan, of all places. Enthiran in 2010 was the most expensive Indian film of its time. Jailer in 2023 took more than six hundred crore rupees. In 2025 he completed fifty years of work.
They pour milk over his cut-outs. He calls himself an ordinary man and nobody believes him, which is fine with everybody.
He also goes missing. Every few years he walks off to the Himalayas for weeks at a time, and the industry waits. An actor whose films open on four thousand screens has organised his life around periodically not being available.
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1996
The political weight is real and was demonstrated once. In 1996 he told his fans to oppose the AIADMK government, and the government fell. From that day, every election in Tamil Nadu came with a question about what he was going to do.
He announced his entry into politics on the last day of 2017 and then spent three years circling it. In October 2020 he disclosed that he had undergone a kidney transplant. On 3 December he said the party would launch in January.
29 December 2020
On 25 December he was admitted to hospital in Hyderabad with severe fluctuations in blood pressure. He was discharged two days later. On the twenty-ninth he released a letter in Tamil saying he would not launch a party after all, that the health scare had been a warning from God, and that he did not want to begin something this large and leave it unfinished.
Fans wept outside his house. Commentators in the state spent a week arguing about whether it was humility, exhaustion or a failure of nerve, and there is no way to settle that from outside a man’s own body.
He was seventy. He had been offered, in effect, a state, and he said he could not carry it.
He took the wig off in front of the whole of Tamil Nadu, and they loved him anyway.
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If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
#1. What is Rajinikanth’s birth name?
#2. Before joining the film industry, what job did Rajinikanth hold in Bangalore?
#3. Which legendary director discovered Rajinikanth and gave him his screen name?
#4. In which film did Rajinikanth make his debut in 1975?
#5. Which Rajinikanth film turned him into a cultural icon in Japan known as “The Dancing Maharaja”?
#6. Who is Rajinikanth’s spiritual guru, whose caves he visits in the Himalayas?
#7. Which 1980 film, a remake of Amitabh Bachchan’s Don, officially catapulted him to superstardom?
#8. Which prestigious award was conferred upon Rajinikanth in 2019?
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What is Rajinikanth’s real name?
His real name is Shivaji Rao Gaikwad. He was born into a Marathi-speaking family in Bangalore.
How did the Rajinikanth life story begin in films?
He was discovered by director K. Balachander at the Madras Film Institute and made his debut in the 1975 film Apoorva Raagangal.
Is Rajinikanth active in politics?
While he frequently voiced his opinions and planned to enter politics in 2017, he eventually decided to step back from formal politics due to health reasons in late 2020.
Why is he called “Thalaivar”?
“Thalaivar” means leader or boss in Tamil. It is a title bestowed upon him by his fans to signify his unparalleled status in the industry.
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Sources & References
The Hollywood Reporter India — the gap between his on-screen and off-screen presentation, and the contrast with MGR and the fur cap.
Deccan Herald — the chronology from his announcement in December 2017 to the withdrawal, including the kidney transplant.
Al Jazeera (29 December 2020) — the letter withdrawing from electoral politics and his reasons for it.
Gulf News — his return to the Bengaluru bus depot where he worked as a conductor.
