Besides MGR he is the only other superstar known by his initials in India. Interestingly, Hindi cinema bigwigs are rarely known by their initials especially in the bygone decades. Similarly NTR was also a cult icon and the legend that still lives like his Tamil Nadu professional colleague. He scored one better than MGR by becoming the second avatar of Lord Krishna in Kaliyuga, an achievement denied to MGR!
Even though he was essentially a Telugu film superstar he also acted in Tamil films expectedly as either Lord Krishna or Lord Rama, and an occasional contemporary hero in one of his early films " Marumagal " (1954, "Ammalakulu " in Telugu.)
He was born in 1923 on into a middle class farming family in heartland Andhra, then part of the Madras Presidency in a fertile village Nimmakuru. Blessed with good looks and fair skin, his thoughts zeroed in on stage, right from his boyhood. Indeed middle class Andhras have always had a penchant for appearing on stage, at least once in their lives. Even in school he took part in plays and later when he joined the Andhra Christian College in Guntur, he became more active doing a variety of plays including Shakespeare. One of his college mates was a handsome young man with a lilting voice who also scaled heights of stardom in later years, Kongara Jaggaiah. In Guntur he had his own theatre troupe National Art Theatre under which banner he made movies in later years.
Besides his looks and charismatic bearing, Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao (to give his full name) had an excellent voice capable of captivating moviegoers at first and later Andhra voters when he sailed into the world of politics…
He took his bow in Telugu cinema in 1949 in a nationalistic movie "Mana Desam" in which he played a police officer like MGR did in his debut in his 1936 hit, Ellis R. Dungan's "Sathi Leelavathi". The back-story of his debut is interesting and needs to be narrated. He and another young man keen on breaking into movies met the then up and coming filmmaker L. V. Prasad at Vijayawada who asked them to come down to Madras and meet him. Within the next few days both took the train to the metropolis where they knew nobody. "NTR was well off and he had in his pocket, money for the return -ticket in case of failure, and also to afford a room in a T. Nagar lodge. I had none of those and slept under the canopy of the starlit night sky on a bench in Paanagal Park. Of course I had no money to buy a return ticket…well, we met Mr. Prasad who gave both of us breaks, Rama Rao in an onscreen role and I joined as an assistant director. Of course we did not have to bother about return tickets!" That was the multilingual hit filmmaker Tatineni Prakasha Rao, who was a card -holding member of the Indian Communist Party and had walked out due to ideological differences with the top brass moving into the movie world.
(This writer had the pleasure of knowing NTR when he was a client of his guru-in-law, top city lawyer V. C. Gopalratnam during the mid 1950s. He also had the privilege of working with Prakasha Rao writing his Tamil award winning children's film "Engalalum Mudiyum" in which he played- a police officer!)
"Mana Desam" was produced by the Telugu star-producer C. Krishnaveni (the second wife of the Raja Saheb of Mirzapuram, a famed Telugu movie mogul and owner of Shobanachala Studios and later Venus Studio in Alwarpet, Madras).
His first lead role was in " Palaturi Pilla " in which he was cast along with another superstar A. Nageswara Rao. (This movie was inspired by the famous novel 'Pizzaro' which was later made in Hindi by S. S. Vasan as "Insaniyat").&nbs |
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