A film festival, titled 'ANR 100—King of the Silver Screen', will be held in 31 cities across India from 20 to 22 September. As part of it, 10 restored classics of the iconic Telugu actor will be screened.
Published Sep 20, 2024 | 6:30 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 21, 2024 | 11:29 AM
ANR centenary celebrations: Remembering a titan thespian. (SureshProdns/X)
For a filmmaking industry that has been as consistently successful and acclaimed as the Telugu film industry, it was always a shame that very little of that industry’s history and heritage was either recorded or preserved.
Most abysmal was the state of the films themselves; one could struggle to get a quality print of an acclaimed blockbuster less than 20 years old, forget a black-and-white classic.
Any Telugu film enthusiast, thus, owes some debt of gratitude to Akkineni Nageswara Rao, who was not only a pivotal figure in Telugu film history but had also been an early proponent of preserving any film-related material and making conscious efforts to create a documented history of his life and his films.
It was of no surprise to anyone that Akkineni Nageswara Rao would be the first Telugu star to have a film retrospective of his work, marking his centenary on 20 September 2024.
ANR, as he was known, was ahead of the curve to the benefit of his industry in other ways too. During the 60s, when the South Indian film industries were joined at the hip by being commonly centred in Madras (erstwhile Chennai), ANR took the brave decision to move to Hyderabad, then a minor film production centre with one Sarathi Studios that was already in teeters.
The then Andhra Pradesh government provided him with requisite support as he transformed a 22-acre rocky patch of land into Annapurna Studios. That the Studios was inaugurated by the President of India points to ANR’s reach into the corridors of power, even with him being apolitical throughout his life, unlike NT Rama Rao (NTR).
NTR, Ghantasala, and ANR pose for a picture. (X)
It is difficult to write about ANR without bringing up NTR and vice versa. Together, they were the first Superstar duo who defined Telugu cinema for some three decades, each distinctly different from the other.
NTR is best known for playing figures of myth and ANR is popular for portraying mortal men. Mortality, in fact, is a major focus of many ANR films.
Few actors gained such fame for playing dying characters on screen as many times as he did, and he did this till he was 60, dying lovelorn and “young” in Premabhishekam (1981), one of the biggest blockbusters in Telugu Cinema.
The differences between NTR and ANR were not just limited to the characters they played onscreen but extended to their personalities offscreen as well.
NTR Rama Rao was a multi-faceted talent, a one-man show who’d write, direct, produce, and act in multiple roles at once. A strong college education under the likes of Viswanatha Satyanarayana made him confident enough to add his input to every field of filmmaking.
ANR, on the other hand, was a collaborative artiste with a great knack for talent spotting.
Akkineni Nageswara Rao and Savitri in a still from ‘Mooga Manasulu’. (X)
A stray shot in a flop film once impressed him enough to work with said film’s director for his next. That director was Adurthi Subba Rao, the most influential Telugu filmmaker of the 1960s, who made 17 films with ANR as the lead.
Thus, he broke new ground in their industry with fresh technique and made popular classics like the reincarnation drama Mooga Manasulu (1964) and underrated gems like the courtroom film Sudigundalu (1968). Both films incidentally feature in the rerelease celebrating ANR’s centenary.
Adurthi Subba Rao also made ANR the first South Star to do a dance number on screen in the film Iddaru Mitrulu (1999).
Two of Telugu cinema’s most notable directors, K Viswanath and Ram Gopal Varma—filmmakers who were didactically opposites—made their debuts under ANR and Annapurna Studios’s aegis, not to mention the countless technicians and artistes who cut their teeth working in the 60-odd films Annapurna Studios had produced till date.
This list includes eminent individuals such as writer Ramana, Bapu, Dasari Narayana Rao, V Madhusudhan Rao, and more.
Akkineni Nageswara Rao surrounded himself with the best talent and intellect he could find. Beyond filmmaking, these collaborations were also a means of education.
A still from the iconic film ‘Devadas’. (X)
ANR had never completed high school, thrust onto the stage at a young age and instead chose to learn through his lifetime, quoting Ghalib’s maxim about the virtue of self-awareness.
His humility and self-awareness helped him prolong his relevance by making intelligent decisions like cutting down on the number of films he did or disavowing genres like mythology due to his limitations.
This self-awareness can undersell Akkineni Nageswara Rao’s talents, but a few can claim to have grown as an actor years after their debut; especially, as they age into playing character roles like ANR did, delivering an acclaimed sleeper hit like Seetharamayya Gari Manavaralu (1991) on the strength of his performance alone and no star power involved or signing off a lengthy career.
His ability becomes all the more apparent as one discovers the ironies of the actor and his characters.
That a child born in underprivileged circumstances became synonymous with rich playboys like his role in Prema Nagar (1971) or that a man with no formal education acted in the most literary adaptations or that an atheist played a gallery of great religious saints like Tukaram and Kalidasa with a fervour ANR was personally known to possess.
The greatest irony of them all was that a man, known for his discipline, self-control, and assiduousness over any matters of health gained the most fame and acclaim playing a series of drunks and addicts through the decades, and was the definitional Devadas for the South with his performance in the titular film released in 1953, earning praise from Dilip Kumar no less.
ANR was a star before the film was released, and even played tragic romantics like Majnu and Salim, but something about him in Devadas was different, that dervish-like physicality, those sorrowful eyes, a previously unfound viscerally and naturalism.
It was the first sign that Akkineni Nageswara Rao was to stand apart from the context of his time, his work discussed a century after his birth. ANR died countless times onscreen, but his legacy lives on.
(Edited by Y Krishna Jyothi)
