Over the past few years, Malayalam megastar Mammooty has been receiving widespread acclaim for his uncompromising commitment to lively roles, consistently prioritizing the actor within him over the fascinating and tempting face of stardom. Recently we have been witnessing his dedication and passion to his profession through his exceptional performance in director Rahul Sadasivan’s period folk horror thriller Bramayugam. However, Mammootty’s rise to stardom and mastery of his success in acting did not happen overnight. In fact, his early performances witness how hard he sruggled to achieve the position he is in today. Although he started cultivating acting skills soon, he initially struggled to achieve box office success too.
in the mid-1980s it was a very hard time for him, and it proved particularly challenging, with the commercial failure of some of his good films even nearly pushing him to the brink of fading from the industry. Once he opened up about the emotional distress he experienced during the mid 1980s, he said it was a period when his career had hit rock bottom. “It was a bad period for me. I thought I would not pick up again. I was desperate. I was humiliated badly as well,” he recalled in a 2002 interview with Karan Thapar on the BBC talk show Face to Face. Looking back on those years, he added, “Though I feel a little happy about it now, my experiences were very bad; people were underestimating me as an actor. That gave me a rebirth afterwards.”
