Happy B’Day Gulshan Grover: When reel-life image affected the real life of Bollywood’s ‘Bad Man’

Gulshan Grover was one of the biggest villains during the late 80s and 90s who played a stylish villain with sophistication. He was very handsome to look at but many times changed his appearance (Kesariya vilayati-Ram Lakhan) and rocked it with great ease. The “Bad Man” of Bollywood as he is popularly known celebrates his birthday today.

As he turns 68, here is an interesting story of how his reel-life image initially badly affected his personal life and created troubles for his parents.

Gulshan Grover’s mother was asked several questions at gurudwara

When Gulshan broke into mainstream cinema initially, people started taking his real-life image as real. In those days, the audience connected the cinema stories and their characters to real life and thought that the actors who portrayed negative roles on the screen were equally bad in their real lives.

Since Gulshan started off with negative roles and worked as a villain for many years in Bollywood, the general public thought that he was a bad man in real life. Even his relatives and close family friends started thinking that he had suddenly become a spoilt man after coming to Mumbai from Delhi.

Gulshan usually went to Gurudwara with his mother. So when his mother went to Gurudwara she was ganged up and the people who knew their family started bombarding her with questions mostly asking how their son had suddenly become such a bad boy. They thought that Gulshan Grover had now abandoned his parents and that a very good boy had turned bad.

His mother tried to clear the confusion and tell them Gulshan was just acting in the movie and he had not changed in real life. But no one was ready to believe it.

Apart from Bollywood, the veteran character actor has also worked in many Hollywood films like Prisoners of the Sun, The Second Jungle Book, and Blind Ambition. When he was told that to become a big star in Hollywood he would have to shift his base and leave Mumbai, Gulshan Grover decided to stay in Bollywood which has given him so much success and name.