How popular is Amitabh Bachchan? Right now when he hosts the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, the average viewership is 250 million.
If he gets injured or sick while filming, millions of Indians do acts so that he will recover. He says that, “Some 80-year-old women said they ate only one meal a day and would sleep on the ground, praying for my recovery, one chap who lived 400km from Mumbai ran backwards from his village to the city and then backwards home again, a total of 800km.”
When he gets letters in the mail, many times he'll get a portrait of himself that's drawn in blood. And some of them are huge portraits that take a lot of blood from the individual.
He also lends himself to being ambassador to the Oscar-type of awards event called the International Indian Film Academy. It has become so popular that Dubai, New York and Amsterdam made independent bids on it, although Yorkshire was chosen to hold it this year.
The BBC took a poll in 2000 about who the greatest actor of the millenium was, and Bachchan beat out even Laurence Olivier for the honor. The amazing thing is that hardly anybody in the west has even heard of him.
Now looking for roles that have a social message after taking 10 years away from acting, he is currently in Britain to promote the launch of his film Baabul, which deals with the remarriage of a widow, which in Hinduism is considered a strong taboo.
He has acted in 150 films throughout his career.
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