ROSHMILA BHATTACHARYA is a senior journalist who, in a career spanning three decades, has worked in three leading publishing houses in the country—The Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Indian Express. For the last six years, she has been heading the entertainment section of Mumbai Mirror, a leading daily with The Times Group. In July 2019, she came out with her first book, Bad Man, the autobiography of Gulshan Grover.
Do you know that the horror movie Mahal (1949) grew out of an eerie experience actor Ashok Kumar had during an overnight stay at a resort? That a nervous Yusuf Khan learnt of his screen name Dilip Kumar only from the promotions of his debut film? Or that first-time director Aditya Chopra had to fool Shah Rukh Khan into agreeing to a story narration by telling him that DDLJ (1995) was actually an action film! An actor lives a hundred lives. He takes on the persona of a stranger and becomes him. He wakes up every morning, wears a different face and sets out to make the world his stage. And in this journey from real to Reel, the man behind the screen idol often remains unknown, except to a chosen few. This book attempts to go beneath the Pancake and the paint, beyond the glam and the glory, to bring to the reader the human behind the celluloid persona. Peppered with anecdotes and candid interviews with some of the Indian cinema most iconic stars, matinee men is an unmatched story of Hollywood as seen through the world of its greatest magicians, the stars.
