He was a guest on the set, but the moment he walked in, he knew what was happening. The hero in the script was supposed to rescue the heroine, who had been tied to a tree by some villains, and a tiger now stood in his way. The beast was supposed to roar; this one was purring like a kitten. Wanting to help, the visitor approached the tiger and looked it in the eye. Without warning, he landed a slap on its face. Instead of growling, the animal whimpered and retreated. The guest shrugged and walked away, knowing he had done what he could.
But the hero now was as vexed as the cat on the set. Rajinikanth, the obsession of tens of millions of Tamil movie fans, left the set and was blunt when asked why: “That man came and slapped the tiger. He will go back to his [own] set, but I have to come back here and shoot with it. Let the tiger calm down.”
A tiger with real fangs and claws; No CGI
“That man” was none other than Dharam Singh Deol, known to the world simply as Dharmendra. While his contemporaries often cultivated carefully curated personas, he was the “Son of the Soil”, a farmer’s son from the village of Nasrali, Punjab, who never quite shook off the dust of the fields.
As Bollywood’s original He-Man, Dharmendra displayed an impossible nerve that often crossed over into real life. He also had a boyish grin and goofiness that set many a female heart fluttering. The combination made him both action star and loverboy, a gift in Bollywood.
Whether playing the shirtless hero in Dharam Veer, the sensitive poet in Anupama, the lovable drunk in Chupke Chupke or the knife-wielding angry young man hunting his parents’ killers in Yaadon Ki Baarat, he brought a vulnerability that belied his stature. He was an action star who was never afraid to look foolish for love.
Over a six-decade career, Dharmendra stunned with antics both on and off the camera. The tiger incident was one. Radhika Sarathkumar, the Tamil heroine on the set that day, vividly remembers the occasion nearly five decades on. What really left her speechless was that it was no CGI cat, like in The Life of Pi. This one had real fangs and claws. One bad switch in its mood, and the outcome could have been very different for Dharmendra. Yet, he had the audacity to provoke it, to get the reaction needed for the shot, which wasn’t even for his film, she mused.
It was also in the days before disclaimers like “No Animals Were Harmed During Filming” became an industry standard, explaining why the episode passed as just another day in Dharmendra’s life, without any hue or cry.
It was, nevertheless, vintage Dharam: A lovable rascal with some of the zaniest solutions at times for life’s trials.
2,000-rupee romance bribe: The light boys who won Hema for Dharmendra
The delightfully mischievous side of Dharmendra was perhaps best captured by the unscripted romance that developed on the sets of the 1975 Sholay, the Western-style tale that would become Indian cinema’s defining blockbuster. Playing Veeru, a crook with a heart of gold, Dharmendra found himself hopelessly smitten with Hema Malini, the film’s garrulous horse-carriage driver.
During a scene in which Veeru teaches Basanti to fire a revolver — a pretext for him to stand close and wrap his arms around her — Dharmendra decided the script’s intimacy wasn’t enough. He quietly struck a deal with the film’s light boys and camera assistants. The rate was 20 rupees (about US$2 at the time, a decent sum for a day’s bribe) for every “mistake” they could manufacture.
Whenever the director called “Action,” a reflector would conveniently drop, or a trolley would jerk. “Cut!” the director would yell, and the embrace would have to be filmed again.
Dharmendra reportedly spent nearly 2,000 rupees ruining takes, purchasing extra minutes with the woman who would eventually become his wife of over four decades.
When asked about the “bribes” years later, the film’s director, Ramesh Sippy, confirmed the ruse with a smile: “I didn’t have to do anything. I just had to… take my time doing my kind of work, which gave them enough time, I guess, to be together.”
A complicated home, an unbreakable dynasty
While Dharmendra won Hema’s heart, he broke two others. One was Prakash Kaur’s, his first wife whom he didn’t divorce but yet found a way to marry Hema. The next was that of Sanjeev Kumar, the retired police officer in Sholay, who was also fascinated with Hema, and hit the bottle hard after losing her, never marrying till his death.
Hema confessed that it was hard for her to resist the wooings of Dharmendra, despite knowing he was married. “He was very fond of me as I was of him,” she once said of their enduring partnership. “Eventually, friendship led to love. Maybe that is what was reflected on the big screen too.”
In an industry with more than its share of awkward situations and relationships, Dharmendra’s indiscretion over the Hema affair was never begrudged by fans who simply knew how to separate his reel-life from real-life.
Ultimately, many came to appreciate the filial commitments that overshadowed his apparent bigamy. Despite marrying Hema, Dharmendra continued living with Prakash and their four children while his new wife built her own home with her two daughters born to him.
From the two marriages, emerged a Deol dynasty of actors led by Prakash’s sons, Sunny and Bobby, Hema’s daughter, Esha — all Bollywood stars in their own right. With Sunny’s two sons entering the industry some 60 years after their grandfather, the dynasty is now into its third generation.
The respect associated with the Deol brand name — where scandals were kept to a bare minimum while its patriarch stayed to his humble, lovable self — was perhaps Dharmendra’s greatest asset.
More than an actor: The human in Dharmendra that shone
He never won a National Award for Best Actor, a fact that often rankled his fans more than it did him. He measured his worth differently. In his final years, often sharing poetry and clips of his farm life on social media, he seemed content with the simple label he had carved out for himself.
“More than an actor, I am just a boy from Punjab, a sweet boy,” he told an interviewer once. “I know people love me for that quality.”
The flood of postings on X and other social platforms after his passing on November 24th, 2025, at the age of 89, affirmed that, and something else: Bollywood had lost one of its truest gentlemen.
From Amitabh Bachchan — his main co-star in Sholay, whom Dharmendra forged an incredible friendship with, predating even the 1975 film — to Karan Johar — the maker of a defining era of Bollywood love stories from the late 90s — the tributes that poured in were an eclectic mix of sorrow and awe.
“Another valiant Giant has left us… left the arena… leaving behind a silence with an unbearable sound,” Amitabh wrote on X. To him, Dharmendra had been more than a friend, telling everyone that he regarded Amitabh, who was six years his junior, a younger brother.
It was Dharmendra who proposed Amitabh for the fellow crook role in Sholay, and lobbied hard to get him into the film. Their on-screen friendship became the gold standard for camaraderie in Indian pop culture. In the final scenes of Sholay, Amitabh’s Jai dies in the arms of Dharmendra’s Veeru, as the soulful rendition of their once happy duet Yeh Dosti plays. The Internet flipped the script in the real-life send-off for Dharmendra, showing a tearful Amitabh as the same song plays.
“Dharam ji… the epitome of greatness, ever linked not only for his renowned physical presence, but for the largeness of his heart, and its most endearing simplicity,” wrote Amitabh in his tribute.
He concluded by observing that Dharmendra brought with him “the earthiness of the village in Punjab” and remained “unsoiled throughout his glorious career”. Also, in a fraternity that witnessed changes every decade, Dharmendra was a constant, noted Amitabh. “(The) fraternity underwent changes… not him.”
Karan, the director who cast Dharmendra in his 2023 blockbuster Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani, summed it up as the “end of an era”.
He described Dharmendra as a mega star with all embodiments of mainstream cinema hero; incredibly handsome with enigmatic screen presence.
While Dharmendra will always be a bonafide legend of Indian cinema, “he was the best human being … so loved by everyone in our industry,” Karan wrote. “He only had immense love and positivity for everyone.”
“Today, there is a gaping hole in our industry … a space that can never be filled by anyone,” Karan wrote, concluding that there can only be one Dharam ji. “We will miss you so much.”
- Barani Krishnan is Americas Editor and founder of justneverforget.com
