Convinced a family curse would kill him before he turned 50, Bollywood actor Sanjeev Kumar deliberately played elderly men on screen just to experience growing old.
In Kumar’s family, there was a deep-seated belief that the men were cursed. His grandfather, father, and brother Kishore had all passed away before reaching the half-century milestone. Believing he shared this fate, Kumar (born Harihar Jethalal Jariwala) lived with a constant premonition of an early death. Tragically, the prophecy held true—he died of a severe heart attack in 1985 at the age of 47. His younger brother Nikul also passed away shortly after, never seeing his 50th birthday.
This premonition heavily influenced his filmography. He was just 37 years old when he played the iconic, revenge-driven Thakur Baldev Singh in Sholay (1975). He portrayed an elderly deaf and mute man in Koshish (1972) while in his early 30s, and regularly played fathers to actors who were nearly his age or older, such as Shashi Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan in Trishul (1978).
His obsession with challenging roles peaked in the 1974 film Naya Din Nai Raat, where he played nine distinct characters representing the nine primary emotions of Indian aesthetics (Navarasa). To pull off the stunt—matching Sivaji Ganesan’s legendary performance in the Tamil original Navarathri—Kumar underwent grueling makeup transformations to portray a sage, a leper, a theater actor, a wealthy drunkard, and an obsessive lover, all in a single movie.
Off-screen, Kumar remained a bachelor his entire life due to a painful unrequited love. He fell deeply in love with his frequent co-star Hema Malini and proposed marriage, but she turned him down. The rejection left him entirely devastated. Though actress Sulakshana Pandit was fiercely in love with him and offered her hand, Kumar refused to marry her, stating he could never get over his feelings for Malini.