Akshay Kumar

Akshay Kumar has made more than 150 films, which is less a statistic than a description of the man's working method. Born Akshay Hari Om Bhatia in New Delhi in 1967, he came up through Hindi action cinema in the 1990s, and the Khiladi run of thrillers stuck the nickname Khiladi Kumar to him permanently. He has since collected two National Film Awards and two Filmfare Awards, and the Government of India gave him the Padma Shri in 2009.

The turn that made him durable was comedy. Hera Pheri in 2000 cast him as Raju, a broke schemer whose plans collapse at exactly the wrong speed, and it revealed a performer whose timing is physical rather than verbal: the reaction shot, the double take, the whole body arriving a beat behind the joke. That gear powered a decade of farce, Garam Masala, Bhool Bhulaiyaa, Welcome, Singh Is Kinng, Bhagam Bhag, the Housefull sequence, and it is the version of him most audiences actually love.

From the mid 2010s he built a second brand out of true stories and civic causes: an evacuation in Airlift, a long con in Special 26, sanitation in Toilet: A Love Story, menstrual hygiene in Pad Man, a courtroom in Jolly LLB 2, a last stand in Kesari, a space programme in Mission Mangal. Some of these are genuinely good and some are the same film wearing a different uniform, and at his rate of production the difference is not always visible from the poster. He remains the most industrious major star in Hindi cinema and the least precious about it.