Shammi Kapoor

山米·卡帕尔

Shamsher Raj Kapoor, Bollywood superstar, died on August 14th, aged 79

山米什尔·罗杰·卡帕尔，宝莱坞巨星，于8月14日逝世，享年79岁

THE stately descent of an eyelid; the five-minute burning glance; tears frozen on a heroine’s cheek; the moustachioed hero standing to pained attention; the slowly circling dance of attendants in and out of curtains to some interminable tune. That was old Bollywood, before Shammi Kapoor came along. He could do old-style too, keeping chastely still and delivering his laments and what not, because it ran in the family’s famous blood. But in 1957, frustration boiling up inside him after 19 films which had made him precisely a nobody, he took a different tack; shaved off the pencil moustache; cropped his long hair into a Presley duck-tail, tossed his head sideways, spun round, shook his hips, and exploded on to the Hindi film scene.

一只眼皮高贵的下垂；眼睛扫射全场5分钟；女主角的脸庞挂着泪滴；八字胡的男主角站在人群中分外耀眼夺目；伴着没完没了的曲子，幕布内外的演员们围成圈子慢慢地跳着舞......在Shammi Kapoor到来之前，这些都是宝莱坞的老一套。他也能循规蹈矩，保持清高，发表悼词，语出惊人等诸如此类因为贵族的血液在他身体里流淌。到1957年，已拍过19部电影的他依然是个跑龙套的，再也忍不住内心煎熬的他爆发了，不过形式标新立异：剃掉八字须，学猫王把长发修剪成鸭尾式；甩甩头发，急转身体，扭动屁股，他横空出现在印地电影屏幕上。

The film was “Tumsa Nahin Dekha” (“Never Seen Anyone Like You”). And India never had. Suddenly, stasis and convention were thrown out of the window. On screen at least, in packed and humid cinemas across the country, everything changed. Shammiji never came that much closer to his heroines, but he seethed with Westernised sex appeal. He was a playboy and a clown, a ceaseless ragger of the girls he loved, who would serenade them on moving trains and dangling in bathrobes from helicopters, and who in his most monstrous hit, “Junglee” (“Wild”), in 1961 slid on his front down a mountainside of snow, leapt up (leather jacket sexily torn open), sang to his heroine that people could call him wild, what could he do, swept up in love, and then roared out over the ice-bound forest, “YAHOO!” His teenage audiences yelled out with him, suddenly liberated. He had won the girl just by being his mad self, and had apparently not asked his family or hers.

这部电影叫《王子家族》（英文名《无人及你》），此类风格的影片从未在印度屏幕上出现过，一经演出，循规蹈矩、常规守旧的电影圈就炸开了锅，再全国大街小巷中那些潮湿的电影院里，一切都被变了样。在银幕上，山米从不会在肢体上过分与女主角亲近，但是他却用西方式的性感吸引对方，让对方着迷。他扮演花花公子，也演小丑，对喜欢的姑娘会死缠烂打；在行驶的列车上位姑娘弹奏小夜曲；穿着睡衣在飞机上晃来晃去；1961年拍摄的《野性》红极一时，影片中，他从雪山坡上滑下来，一跃而起，性感地敞开皮夹克，向女主角献唱，这够野性了吧？可他还不干休，沉醉于爱情甜蜜，禁不住朝着冰天雪地的原野上放声大喊：“呀…唬！”，看到这个场景的年轻人也都竞相模仿，纷纷感受到一种解脱。他用痴狂赢得了姑娘的芳心，当然，这一切并没有征得双方父母的同意。

Offscreen, Shammiji behaved much the same. He was no natural mover, he insisted, and tended to tumble into lakes and damage himself (he put this down, oddly, to being a Libra, a not entirely balanced one, easily floored), but he also realised that classes could not teach him anything. His extraordinary, spontaneous style was never choreographed. When he heard good music, he had to dance to it. His favourite back-singer, Mohammad Rafi (who sang his numbers for him in the Bollywood tradition, and who would merely be warned by Shammiji “I might do this”, or “I might do that” before he threw himself in), said that if he had been born a leaf, he would have fallen off dancing.

在银幕下，Shammiji的行为与电影中的角色差不离，他坚持说自己天生就不能运动，稍稍一动，就有可能掉进湖里，弄伤自己。他自己是天秤座，但平衡力极差，动不动就滑倒，他说这点很奇怪。在课堂上，他并没与学到太多东西，他那与众不同、天真率直的舞蹈风格并非设计出来的。每当动听的音乐响起，他就会不由自主的随之舞动。穆罕默德·拉菲是他最喜欢的伴唱，按照宝莱坞的习俗，为山米唱数字，在他投身音乐领域之前，只有山米警告他说：“我做这个也可以，做那个也行”，他曾评价，如果说山米是一片叶子，即使飘零时，也会随风起舞。

Love came easily to him too, and from an early age. At 12, the gorgeous green eyes already starting to smoulder, he boldly brushed lips with a classmate as they sang “I’ll k-i-s-s kiss you in the d-a-r-k dark” at a concert in St Joseph’s convent in Mumbai. He never forgot that. In fifth standard at Don Bosco, playing goalie at a school match, he preferred to take shelter from the rain under a beautiful girl’s umbrella; his team lost by 11 goals. Both his deeply happy marriages were precipitate. His first, in 1955 to Geeta Bali, a film star better known than he was, took place in pouring rain in a temple near the Napean Sea Road in Mumbai with only one witness, and without informing the families. His second, to Neela Devi after Geeta had died of smallpox in 1965, was proposed, together with lunch at his place, on the telephone; he had last seen her, a nine-year-old with pigtails, as he acted at 19 with his father’s theatre company. Impulsiveness was just his way.

从他小时候开始，桃花运就不断。12岁时，他那双美丽的绿眼睛就会放电。在孟买圣·瑟夫女修道院的演唱会上，他就敢一边唱着“我会在黑暗中吻你”，一边舔另一个同学的嘴唇，这一幕，他至今难以忘怀。在Don Bosco比赛中，担任守门员的他竟躲在一位漂亮姑娘的伞下避雨，他的球队输了十一个球。他有过两次幸福快乐的婚姻，都是闪婚。第一次是在1955年，他与当时名气比自己大的吉塔·巴莉结婚，婚礼在孟买Nepean海滨路附近的一座小庙里举行，那天大雨瓢泼，他们并没有通知双方家长，只有一个见证人。1965年，吉塔死于天花。随后，他与尼拉·德维喜结连理。他们相遇后在他的住处共进午餐，随后，shammi就用电话向尼拉求婚了。想想距离上一次见面，那时的她只有九岁，梳着马尾辫，而19岁的他则在父亲的戏剧公司里演出。冲动是他的性格。

A film star’s high ego flashed from time to time. If he was offered roles too late in the casting (even by his close director-friend, Nasir Husain), he would turn them down. For “Tumsa Nahin Dekha” (a lucky break in several ways, for the established star Dev Anand was meant to play the lead, but had walked out), he was offered 20,000 rupees and complained it was too little; at which the producer slapped him for a fool. Generally, however, he was amiable and humble, sitting on the grass to chat to fans who lined the roads to see him, or wolfing down makhani dal at a kerbside stall on the way from Haldwani to Delhi. He relished simplicity as well as stardom, and “beautiful” (“Yes, sir!”) was a word he used often when he reviewed his life.

作为电影明星，他架子挺大。如果在筛选演员是，晚点给他分配角色，他就不演了，就算是对要好的朋友Nasir Husain导演，他也不给人家面子；Tumsa Nahin Dekha 曾请他出演，片酬是2万卢比，他却嫌片酬太低，气的制片人抬手就是一巴掌，大骂他愚蠢。幸亏后来由于担任该片男一号的戴维·柯南中途解约及其他种种原因，他没有参演此片。不过，在实际生活中，他平和又谦逊：影迷们列队来看他，他就坐在草坪上同他们聊天；从哈德瓦里去德里，途中他在路边摊前止步，狼吞虎咽地吃完一份黄油小扁豆。他推崇质朴的个性，同时又享受演员的身份。每当回忆起前妻，“美丽”（“是的，先生！”）这个词总是挂在他嘴边。

His appetite, and his bouts of liking alcohol (as a boy he stole a bottle of champagne from a hotel in Wadala, being beaten nicely for it), made him run to bloat in the end, and then to kidney trouble. The films got worse, and he gave up romantic leads to try directing, which went badly, and character roles. To his brothers’ disgust—Raj and Shashi both being more “serious” actors—he appeared in the mid-1980s in a hugely popular TV ad for Pan Parag chewing tobacco, merely for the chance to act opposite his idol Ashok Kumar. They beamed together, two ample men on sofas.

他胃口奇好，嗜酒成瘾，小时候曾从瓦德拉的一家酒店里偷香槟，被捉住后，美美地挨了一顿揍。饮酒过度致使他渐渐肥胖起来，并引发肝脏问题。他的电影每况愈下，于是他放弃了那些光鲜的主演角色，尝试做导演，但这也不尽如人意，转而他演起别的来。他的兄弟raj和shashi都是正规演员，而shamiji的做法为他们所不齿-----在二十世纪八十年代中期，在某档非常流行的电视广告中，他叼着香烟为pan parag品牌代言，而他这么做，也仅仅是为了和自己的偶像阿舒柯·库马尔同台竞技。广告中，两个大男人倚在沙发上抽着烟，烟头的火光一闪一闪。

Surfing the air

空中翱翔

Of his more than 100 pictures only a dozen or so shone (“Dil Deke Dekho”, “An Evening in Paris”, “Kashmir Ki Kali”), treasured for the moves and the hopelessly catchy songs. It was widely believed in India, first, that Elvis had modelled himself on Shammiji, rather than the other way about; and second, that the Yahoo! internet portal, named after his famous shout, was actually owned by him. Shammiji, a computer buff whose delight in old age was to surf the net as he had once surfed the air, never objected to that. There was more than one way to embrace the modern and thoroughly banish the blues.

在他的100多张照片中，只有十来张惹人注意，例如“Dil Deke Dekho”、《巴黎一夜》、“Kashimir ki kali”，这些照片均因经典影片和朗朗上口的歌曲而愈显珍贵。印度绝大部分人都相信：1.猫王一直以来都是在模仿shamiji，其实是Shamiji模仿猫王；2.雅虎网站得名于shamiji那声著名的呐喊，所以该归他管，而他也不反对这种想法。就如同他年轻时爱太空一样，老年时期，shamiji最大的乐趣就是上网。有多种方式享受现代文明，让人遗忘悲伤。