Kamal Haasan

The term may be new but pan-India stardom isn't. Kamal Haasan, who turns 68 on Monday, was the biggest pan-India star ever and there has not been one like ...

[Akshay Kumar](https://www.hindustantimes.com/topic/akshay-kumar) as the villain. [Rajinikanth](https://www.hindustantimes.com/topic/rajinikanth), Nagarjuna, and Venkatesh--were crossing over to Hindi films, Kamal was bringing his films to the Hindi audience. Enthiran (2010) was marketed and released in Hindi as Robot and had Aishwarya Rai as the female lead. The true testament to the success of this approach is that it was eventually adopted by Rajinikanth as well, but a decade later. The film was released in Hindi as Hindustani. Not only was it marketed as a Hindi film, it cast actors known in the north (Urmila Matondkar and Manisha Koirala) and the Hindi dub had popular Bollywood actors’ voices. This made him popular in north India, more than his contemporaries, some of whom (maybe only Rajini) were bigger stars than him down south. The first in this experiment was the 1996 blockbuster Indian. [Kamal Haasan](https://www.hindustantimes.com/topic/kamal-haasan) has worked in 232 films. Films like Guru and Ullasa Paravaigal (both 1980) truly broke the language barrier in terms of box office collection. [Baahubali: The Beginning](https://www.hindustantimes.com/topic/baahubali) that brought the term pan-India into Indian cinema’s lexicon. Disregarding the quest for the first, there can be no doubts that the biggest pan-India star India has seen has been Kamal Haasan.