Dharmendra Kewal Krishna Deol (1935-2025), who passed away at the age of 89 on November 24, 2025, leaves behind a career so vast that any effort to account for it fully risks blurring emotional contours. Over the course of six decades, he appeared in hundreds of films — hits, near-hits, experimental and misfires — and his popularity extended across South Asia in a way few actors can match.

Yet, this obituary confines itself to a small cluster of roles in Bandini (1963), Sholay (1975), Maa (1976), Ram Balram (1980), Razia Sultan (1983) and Life in a… Metro (2007).

Not all of these were blockbusters. Some were uneven, others technically flawed, and several have long since slipped from the public’s memory. I have chosen them because I watched most of them during my school and college years in the 1970s and 1980s — the General Zia years in Pakistan, when our films started their downwards trajectory, while Indian films were temples of escape — and because these particular films, for reasons both artistic and personal, have stayed with me long after many others faded.

Born in 1935 in rural Punjab, Dharmendra arrived in Bombay armed with a photograph that won a magazine contest, a stubborn belief in his luck, and the willingness to wait — sometimes for hours outside studio gates. And he never forgot those early struggles. Even at the height of his fame, there was something faintly self-effacing about him, a quietness beneath the physical swagger.

The actor who died on November 24 was indeed a star. But he was far more than that. His gestures, glances and tones of voice belonged to a cinematic era when vulnerability was allowed, masculinity was rarely cruel, and emotions were permitted to take their time

That quality first surfaced in Bandini, where he played Deven, a humane prison doctor offering compassion and a gentleness to Nutan’s tormented inmate. The film, sombre and restrained, gave him room to show a sincerity unusual among the romantic heroes of the period.

His scenes carried the air of a man who listened first and spoke later. The Dharmendra who appeared in Sholay, a decade later, seemed made from entirely different material. As Veeru, he was the living pulse of that rambling frontier tale: exuberant, reckless, affectionate and never taking himself too seriously.

The story of two petty criminals hired to defend a village has been retold endlessly, but what gave it endurance was the chemistry between Veeru and Amitabh Bachchan’s Jai — two drifters who found, in each other, the brotherhood life had denied them. Veeru’s flirtations, tantrums and bravado, acted with unforced ease, became reference points across the Subcontinent.

It was the sort of role that enshrined Dharmendra in cultural memory — not merely as a star, but as a companionable presence in countless homes. In Maa, however, he shifted gears completely.

The film is a melodrama of guilt, grief and uneasy redemption. Dharmendra played Vijay, a trapper of wild animals who lived with his mother deep inside the south Indian forests. His work — supplying animals to circuses and zoos — sets him on a collision course with nature itself. His mother warns him that tearing young animals away from their mothers invites wrath, but he ignores her. A lioness, maddened by the loss of her cubs, attacks him savagely.

Despite surviving — thanks to his mother and to Nimmi, the woman he hopes to marry — he resumes trapping, this time capturing a baby elephant. The mother elephant pursues the transport truck, overturns it and, in the chaos, strikes Vijay’s mother down. The dying woman makes him promise that he will abandon killing and return every captive creature to its home. The emotional centre of the film lies here: Dharmendra, holding his mortally wounded mother and howling with the sort of grief that momentarily dissolved the boundary between actor and character.

He keeps his promise. He releases the cubs back into the wild and then searches desperately for the lost baby elephant Ganesh — now roaming a bewildering city. Meanwhile, the enraged mother elephant storms through the countryside, destroying crops and huts, and closing in on the one person left whom Vijay cannot bear to lose. The story was unabashedly dramatic, sometimes implausible, but Dharmendra anchored it in a believable inner conflict. For many viewers — including this writer — it remains one of his most emotionally resonant roles.

In Razia Sultan (1983), he entered a wholly different world. As Yakut, the loyal general whose forbidden love for Razia Sultan triggers palace intrigue and tragedy, Dharmendra delivered a performance built on restraint rather than spectacle. The film’s visual excess was considerable, but he played Yakut with a quiet devotion that steadied the otherwise ornate narrative. It showed how far he had travelled from the earnest young doctor of Bandini and how easily he could adapt to the demands of a period drama.

Ram Balram (1980), reuniting him with Amitabh Bachchan, was a more commercial affair. Dharmendra played Ram, an elder brother corrupted by misinformation and distanced from his sibling. The plot — a web of deceit, violence and eventual reconciliation — was standard fare, but he infused Ram with a credible blend of wounded pride and lingering affection. For many college-going viewers of the era, the two-brother dynamic had irresistible appeal, and Dharmendra’s performance brought the necessary emotional muscle to an otherwise formulaic script.

Decades later, in Life in a… Metro (2007), Dharmendra reappeared in a cinema that had changed beyond recognition. The film’s interlocking tales of contemporary Mumbai — of loneliness, ambition and emotional drift — belonged to a younger generation. Yet, his presence as Amol, an elderly man seeking to reclaim a love abandoned in youth, provided it with a tender counterpoint.

His scenes, played with diffidence and a softening of tone that age had imposed, were a small masterclass in understatement. For younger audiences, it was as though a legend had quietly stepped back on to the stage, not to command attention, but simply to remind them of a gentler emotional vocabulary.

These films — some celebrated, some flawed, some half-forgotten — endure in memory precisely because Dharmendra himself endures… through gestures, glances and tones of voice that belonged to a cinematic era when vulnerability was allowed, masculinity was rarely cruel, and emotions were permitted to take their time. He was a star, yes, but one whose screen warmth turned him into something rarer: a familiar presence who accompanied viewers through their own lives. He carried fame lightly.

Now that he has gone, an entire cinematic era recedes with him. The films chosen here represent only a fraction of his work; I watched many more in crowded rooms in Karachi, where VCRs were galore, but most have faded into the haze of time. These few, though — not all successful, not all polished — have survived in memory.

And perhaps that is the truest measure of his legacy: that long after the box-office tallies are forgotten, emotional remnants remain.

The writer is a columnist, educator and film critic. He can be contacted at mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk.

X: @NaazirMahmood

Published in Dawn, ICON, November 30th, 2025