Why Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar and Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman Khan are Bollywood’s unbeatable 5

Sep 2 , 2020

Salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar are among Bollywood’s biggest actors. Photos: @beingsalmankhan, @amitabhbachchan, @akshaykumar/Instagram

Big B, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan continue to dominate Mumbai’s film industry like no other actor – they command massive fan bases and huge pay cheques, and still pack a huge punch where it counts: the box office, both in the US and Asia

Five Bollywood actors have dominated India’s pop culture consciousness for decades – Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, and of course, Akshay Kumar.

Professionally, they procure title and tailor-made roles and franchise films, and head massive productions. Personally, it’s a life of private jets, sea-view mansions, a fleet of imported cars … Everything about their lives is king-size.

Read about these five men who continue to rule the roost in Mumbai’s tinsel town.

Amitabh ‘Big B’ Bachchan

Now 77 years old, there is arguably no Indian alive more famous than Amitabh Bachchan. Bachchan (whose name in Sanskrit translates to “immeasurable splendour” or, prophetically, “everlasting light”) survives, outlives and outshines all celebrity. Every weekend, crowds gather outside his home in Mumbai for a sighting of the living legend – and his equally famous family of actors – wife Jaya, son and Abhishek Bachchan and daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.

Bachchan catapulted to stardom with the box office success of the action drama Zanjeer (Chains) in 1973, and went on to do a series of movies that established his status as India’s “angry young man”. (Until Zanjeer, he had appeared in smaller roles in several films.)

Since then, his career has remained unmatched – no other actor has held the audience captive the way he has. All his contemporaries are in various stages of retirement, and men decades younger do not possess his work ethic, finesse or stamina (he stars in two or more films annually without fail).