Meet actor who is a pan-India star but was once in the Indian Air Force.
The term pan-India has largely been used for bigger stars, the ones that lead films and whose faces are plastered on the posters. But there are many other actors whose fame and work transcend boundaries of language and state borders in India, even among those branded ‘character artistes’. This is the story of one such actor, who has given hits across industries, even though he never wanted to be an actor himself.
The pan-India actor who was once an Indian Air Force personnel
Muhammad Hanif, popularly known by his screen name Nassar, is one of the most celebrated and successful actors of his generation. He has worked in several hits across Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, and Malayalam cinema. But before all of it, Nassar – when he was just Hanif – was in the Indian Air Force. After completing his college at Madras Christian College, Hanif joined the air force where he worked as ground staff for a brief time. However, he had already been part of theatre groups in college and his father always pushed him to take acting up professionally.
How Nassar’s father convinced him to be an actor
Even though Hanif was serving in the IAF, his father kept encouraging him to try his hand at acting. Egged on by that, Hanif studied acting at two different schools – the South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce’s Film Institute and the Tamil Nadu Institute for Film and Television Technology. Eventually, he began acting in theatre and in his 30s, he quit his Air Force job to take up acting full time, making his film debut at 37 in K Balachander’s Kalyana Agathigal. Nassar has worked in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, as well as English and Bengali films, showing his prowess in seven languages.
Nassar’s Rs 2200-crore hit
Nassar has given blockbusters across languages, working in hits like Rowdy Rathore and Chachi 420 in Hindi, and Jeans and Iruvar in Tamil. But his biggest success was as the villainous Biijaladeva in the two Baahubali films, that collectively earned over Rs 2300 crore at the box office, turning the veteran actor into a household name across India, making him truly pan-India.
