The Pathbreaker
Way back in the 1970s, Feroz Khan took on a Wild West look, complete with huge sideburns, a cowboy hat, jacket and boots and holstered guns in his belt. He became the Indian cowboy in Khote Sikkey (1974) and Kaala Sona (1975). The latter film was a hit, the former, reportedly, a modest success. Of course, there was also the 1980 flop Chunaoti.

At a time when shooting abroad was a rarity, and movies on adventure sports were unheard of, Khan shot most of his own films abroad, using European locations and the Grand Prix car race as a backdrop for his maiden film as producer-director, Apradh (1972), and similarly going on to shoot in Kabul (Dharmatma) and other exotic locations as dictated by the storylines of Qurbani, Yalgaar and Janasheen. Khan thus based his stories in foreign countries and did not believe in thrusting locations for a song or two in India-based subjects! He also preferred original scripts, except when he took some inspiration from The Godfather in Dharmatma and made a much-maligned Hindi remake of Nayakan in Dayavan (1988).

And if his films were about fast cars, fast women and foot-tapping songs, Khan always reflected his own interests through them. The Apradh Grand Prix came because of his personal love for sports cars and racing. The horses in Dharmatma et al happened because of his love for the animals, which he reared with great care at his Bengalooru farmhouse.

Ironically at the time of Janasheen, the People For Animals filed a case against his use of a lion and a chimp in that film, but when he passed away, Khan was vindicated when the Indian branch of the International Organization for Animal Protection (OIPA) lit a candle in his honour. And such was his love for animals that he insisted on seeing his pets for one last time days before his death, which is when son Fardeen chartered a flight to take his dad there to fulfill his last wish.

Of style and stars
The original style icon, Feroz Khan always underplayed his stylized characters and flaunted a lean-and-mean look in an era when heroes had the well-rounded, well-fed look, except for the few men of machismo like Dharmendra, Vinod Khanna and the resurgent Sunil Dutt of the ‘70s. Quite naturally, these were the heroes who were his favourite male co-stars in several films each. Khanna, also a very close friend, was also cast in two of Khan’s own films, Qurbani and Dayavan, and he affectionately recalled how Khan was one of the first to sign him after his post-Rajneesh comeback in the late ‘80s.

Incidentally, Sunil Dutt’s association with Khan spanned over three decades, from Didi (1959) to the unreleased Lahoo Pukarega in the ‘80s, with Pyasi Sham, Geeta Mera Naam, the hit Nagin and Darinda as well. The association went on to Nargis in her home production Raat Aur Din, and Khan repaid the debt by casting their son Sanjay Dutt in his film Yalgaar.

It was also an interestingly quirky habit of Khan to steal the show when the other hero had the longer role! When he starred in his first major hit, Phani Mazumdar’s Oonche Log (1965), Khan left his mark despite the presence of habitual scene-stealer Raaj Kumar and the man who was arguably India’s best actor, Ashok Kumar. In Ramanand Sagar’s Arzoo the following year, his performance was appreciated more than that of main hero Rajendra Kumar, who was then at his peak!

And if he still had to wait till 1970 for his big breakthrough, it was also to be in performances that stood out vis-à-vis the topmost heroes of that year - Dharmendra in Yash Chopra’s Aadmi Aur Insaan and Rajesh Khanna in Asit Sen’s Safar, followed by his effortless overshadowing of brother Sanjay Khan in the 1971 films Mela (a success) and Upaasna.

Among the ladies, Khan worked most frequently with Mumtaz, right from his B-grade solo films like their trio of 1967 films Woh Koi Aur Hoga, Aag and C.I.D. 909 (the latter two did well) to A-graders like Aadmi Aur Insaan, Mela, Upaasna and Nagin. By the time Khan made his first film, Apradh with her, Mumtaz was the reigning heroine. And in the millennium, they were to cement their long association with the marriage of son Fardeen Khan with Natasha Madhvani, Mumtaz’s daughter.

Khan’s list of romantic co-stars includes lowbrow starlets and the likes of Kum Kum all the way to Nargis, with Sharmila Tagore, Sadhana, Tanuja, Asha Parekh, Reena Roy, Parveen Babi, Neetu Singh and Sulakshana Pandit in between. But his own productions always featured the commercial cream of the respective years that included - Mumtaz apart - Hema Malini, Rekha, Zeenat Aman and Sridevi (his youngest romantic co-star) and (for other heroes in his films) Dimple Kapadia, Madhuri Dixit and Manisha Koirala. Getting bolder, he also introduced (opposite son Fardeen) new faces Meghna Kothari in Prem Aggan and Celina Jaitley in Janasheen.

The professional journey
Born on September 25, 1939 to Sadiq Ali Khan Tanoli, (a Pathan from Afghanistan) and Iranian mother Fatima, Khan was the eldest of four brothers, all of whom came into films with varying degrees of success - Sanjay Khan, Sameer (who was hero in a few films in the ‘70s) and Akbar Khan.

Beginning with small roles in Arabind Sen’s Zamana (1957) and K.Narayan Kale’s Didi (1959), Khan first played the lead in and as Dwarka Khosla’s Reporter Raju (1962). He was even considered seriously for Rajendra Kumar’s role in Raj Kapoor’s Sangam and for Manoj Kumar’s character in A.Bhimsingh’s Aadmi, where he would have faced thespians Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar respectively, but it was not to be. Among his early films in minor roles that did well were Suhagan and Bahurani, both featuring Guru Dutt, while his other outside hits and successes later were to also include Shankar Shambhu and Nagin, the 7-hero 7-heroine horror film from Rajkumar Kohli.

Khan departed in a blaze of glory - with reams of tributes by associates. His last film as producer-director-editor, Janasheen (2003) was a success, and after that he was planning a remake of FK International’s biggest triumph, Qurbani. His last film as an actor, Welcome (2007) was also a blockbuster.

The Musical Visionary
As an actor, Feroz Khan had his share of great songs like Dil ki girah (Raat Aur Din/Shankar-Jaikishan), Jo tumko ho pasand (Safar/Kalyanji-Anandji), Jaag dil-e-diwana (Oonche Log/ Chitragupta), Darpan ko dekha (Upaasna/K-A) and Mujhe nahin poonchni (Anjaan Raahen/ K-A) in his outside films. But it was as filmmaker that he proved a true-blue musical visionary.

Kalyanji-Anandji scored music for his first four and only hit productions, Apradh, Dharmatma, Qurbani and Janbaaz. Recalls Anandji, “Feroz Khan wanted everything different and had a strong liking for Arabic music, especially Middle-Eastern instruments and rhythms. He dared use a tabla in our Western club number Ae naujawan hai sab kuchh yahaan in Apradh in 1972! The song, which lost out to the other songs of the film then, got its due when it was used as the base for Don’t phunk with me by the rap group Black-Eyed Peas and won them the Grammy!”

Adds the composer, “He loved our mukhda Laila O Laila for Qurbani because it was about a beautiful girl and his daughter too was named Laila! And because that too was a club song, he had rejected several of Indeewar’s mukhdas for weeks because they had the usual words like bahaar and dil !”

In an era when new singers were considered risky, Khan insisted on fresh voices like Kanchan (Dharmatma), Anwar and Nazia Hassan (Qurbani), Sapna Mukherjee and Mahesh Gadhvi (Janbaaz) and Jolly Mukherjee (Dayavan). Says Anandji, “We were doing shows in London and Feroz decided to record two songs for Janbaaz there and flew over. Sadhana Sargam, Manhar and newcomer Sapna Mukherjee were all a part of our troupe and we took Mahesh Gadhvi, who was based in London, and recorded Har kisiko nahin milta and Jaan-e-jaana o jaan-e-jaana with these four singers.”

The mukhda of Aap jaisa koi were written for a situation in Dharmatma, notes Anandji, but later the song Meri galiyon se was used instead and Biddu, a London-based NRI, came in to compose the song in what was otherwise a Kalyanji-Anandji score in Qurbani - a first in contemporary Hindi cinema. Pakistani crooner Nazia Hasan rendered the cult song that was India’s first modern “item” song. Twenty years later, pop composers and Pakistani singers coming in for special songs were to become a trend!

The last song that K-A recorded for a FK film was for the still-born film in the ‘80s, Kasak, in the voices of Mohammed Aziz, Nitin Mukesh and Suresh Wadkar. The song made its way to the background score of Yalgaar which had background music by Kalyanji’s son Viju Shah with the songs composed by Channi Singh, another new talent who also co-composed for Janasheen. “Feroz Khan told us candidly that distributors wanted Laxmikant-Pyarelal for Dayavan,” says Anandji. But while Dayavan had two hits, Aaj phir tumpe pyar aaya hai and Chahe meri jaan tu le le, the filmmaker moved to diverse composers later - with unremarkable results - in Yalgaar, Prem Aggan and Janasheen.

The nationalist
Khan, who always lived on his own terms (he had married a Hindu designer, Sundari, in 1965) with non-conformism as his mantra, was a staunch nationalist who never discriminated between religions, wearing a Shirdi Sai Baba ring and carrying the saint’s picture at all times. Later, he was to defy Islamic moulvis and let both his children marry Hindus, with daughter Laila wedding tennis player Rohit Rajpal.

Trivia-l Pursuits:
Interestingly, Khan’s most frequent screen name was Rajesh, including in three of his own productions, Yalgaar, Janbaaz and Qurbani, and a lot of his screen names began with the letter ‘R’. In his last three acting vehicles, Janasheen (2003), Ek Khiladi Ek Haseena (2005) and Welcome (2007), he played a bald don! And in both Janasheen and Ek Khiladi…, he did not play his son Fardeen’s father! Three more of his characters, very interestingly if coincidentally, were named after giants in the film industry - Jaikishan (composer) in Aadmi Aur Insaan, Shekhar Kapoor in Safar and Rajnikant in Oonche Log, while the Feroz Khan-Vinod Khanna film Shankar Shambhu was named after the famous duo of qawwals!

Trivia hunters will also be interested to know that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)’s Tarzan Goes To India, a 1962 Hollywood film directed by top-line director John Guillermin, who later made films like The Towering Inferno and The Tracker, featured Khan in his struggling days. Cast opposite Simi Garewal, he had portrayed an Indian prince. In 1974, his Punjabi film Bhagat Dhanna Jatt was released, directed by Dara Singh. He also starred in the Sadhana home production Geeta Mera Naam and in Ek Sapera Ek Lutera, he portrayed a dual role.