Govinda

There is a reason a generation still calls him Chi Chi. Govinda, born in 1963 to the former actor Aroon and the singer-actress Nirmala Devi, spent the 1990s as the most purely enjoyable performer in Hindi cinema, and nobody has quite replaced him since.

He started as an action and dancing hero. Love 86 was the first film, Ilzaam followed the same year, and the late eighties gave him a steady run of hits: Marte Dam Tak, Khudgarz, Sindoor, Hatya, Swarg, Hum. Solid, unremarkable stardom.

Then he reinvented himself, which is the part people forget. Shola Aur Shabnam in 1992 and Aankhen in 1993 turned him into a comic lead, and what followed is the run everyone actually remembers: Raja Babu, Coolie No. 1, Saajan Chale Sasural, Hero No. 1. His timing and his dancing were doing something nobody else in the industry could do, and audiences knew it long before the critics conceded it.

He went into politics in 2004, joined the Indian National Congress, and won the Mumbai North seat as an MP before stepping away from active politics in 2009.

The cameras have never stopped caring. Everything below is our own footage.

More on Govinda: en.wikipedia.org