Who Is Amitabh Bachchan?

1. Allahabad, poetry and a voice that was first rejected

Amitabh Bachchan was born on 11 October 1942 in Allahabad, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, the elder son of the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Teji Bachchan. His father's poetry, above all the long poem Madhushala, was part of the household's air, and the young Amitabh grew up in a home where literature, debate and public life were taken seriously. He was educated at Sherwood College in Nainital and Kirori Mal College in Delhi, where he acted in student theatre, and after university he worked briefly in Calcutta in a shipping firm, a respectable but unremarkable job that gave no hint of what would follow. The detail that has become legend is that he was rejected by All India Radio because his voice was judged unsuitable for broadcasting, a judgement that now reads as one of the great misreadings in Indian cultural history, since that deep baritone would become one of the most recognisable voices in the country.

His entry into films was slow and unglamorous. He arrived in Bombay in the late 1960s, worked as a voice narrator, and made his acting debut in Saat Hindustani in 1969, a film about seven Indians trying to liberate Goa that won him a National Film Award for best newcomer. Early leading roles in films such as Anand, in which he played a sober doctor opposite Rajesh Khanna, showed his talent but did not make him a star. The Hindi film industry of the time was dominated by romantic heroes, and Bachchan, tall, thin and angular, did not fit the mould. For several years he was a respected supporting actor in search of a breakthrough, and the breakthrough, when it came, depended on a change in what Indian audiences wanted from their heroes.

The change was social as much as cinematic. India in the early 1970s was a country of food shortages, strikes, the Emergency's approach and a widespread sense that the system was rigged against the poor. The romantic hero of the 1960s, singing in the mountains, no longer matched the mood of the streets. Bachchan's breakthrough arrived in 1973 with Zanjeer, a film in which he played a police officer who takes the law into his own hands, and it was followed by Deewaar, Sholay and a run of films that made him the biggest star in Indian cinema. The angry young man was born, and with him a new kind of Hindi film hero.

2. The angry young man: why Zanjeer and Deewaar mattered

Zanjeer, released in 1973 and directed by Prakash Mehra, cast Bachchan as Inspector Vijay Khanna, a man whose parents were murdered and who pursues justice with a cold, contained fury. The film's famous line about the system, and its hero's refusal to smile, to sing romantic duets or to forgive, struck a chord that no one in the industry had anticipated. It was the first of a series of films written by the screenwriting duo Salim-Javed that built the angry young man into a myth: Deewaar in 1975, in which he played a dockworker turned smuggler who sacrifices everything for his family and clashes with his policeman brother, and Sholay, also in 1975, in which he played Jai, the laconic, doomed friend of Dharmendra's Veeru. Sholay became the most successful Indian film of its era and remains a reference point for Hindi cinema.

The persona worked because it was not simply anger. Bachchan's Vijay was quiet, wounded and principled, a man who had been failed by institutions and who therefore acted alone. Audiences who queued for hours recognised in him their own frustrations with a bureaucracy that did not answer, a police force that did not protect and an economy that did not provide jobs. Film historians have compared the figure to the disillusioned heroes of American cinema, but the Indian version had its own moral grammar: the angry young man was not a criminal by choice but a decent man driven to the edge, and his violence was presented as a last resort rather than a pleasure. That moral framing allowed audiences across class and region to identify with him without reservation.

The commercial scale of the phenomenon was extraordinary. Through the late 1970s and early 1980s Bachchan dominated the box office in a way that few actors anywhere have matched, sometimes with several hits in a single year. Films such as Don, Amar Akbar Anthony, Trishul, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar and Laawaris made him a pan-Indian star, dubbed into many languages and watched from the Gulf to the Caribbean. His partnership with the writers Salim-Javed, the directors Prakash Mehra, Yash Chopra and Manmohan Desai, and the playback singer Kishore Kumar, whose voice became inseparable from Bachchan's screen image, created a body of work that still defines popular Hindi cinema. For a generation, he was not merely a star; he was the screen itself.

3. The near-fatal accident and the politics of the 1980s

In July 1982, while filming the action film Coolie, Bachchan suffered a near-fatal injury during a fight scene, rupturing his spleen and losing a large amount of blood. The country followed his hospitalisation day by day, with crowds praying outside the hospital and newspapers carrying daily bulletins on his condition. He recovered after surgery and a long convalescence, and Coolie, when it was released, became a huge success partly because audiences knew the story behind it. The episode deepened the bond between star and public: Bachchan was no longer only a screen hero but a man whose survival had been a national event, and the image of his vulnerability became part of his legend.

Two years later, in 1984, he entered politics, winning a parliamentary seat from Allahabad as a candidate of the Congress Party, with the support of his family's long friendship with the Nehru-Gandhi family. His political career was short and unhappy. He resigned in 1987 amid the controversy over the Bofors arms deal, in which his name was raised by critics, though no charges against him were ever established and he was later cleared in the relevant proceedings. The experience left him disillusioned with public life, and he has spoken since of politics as a world he did not belong to. The episode is important because it shows the limits of stardom as political capital: the qualities that made him a beloved screen figure did not translate into the compromises and scrutiny of electoral politics, and he left it behind rather than clinging to it.

The late 1980s and 1990s were the most difficult years of his career. His production company, Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited, launched in the mid-1990s, ran into serious financial trouble, and a series of films failed at the box office. By the end of the 1990s, the man who had once been the biggest star in India was facing debts, lawsuits and the real possibility that his career was over. He has spoken candidly about that period, describing sleepless nights and creditors at his door, and the candour itself became part of his later appeal. The comeback that followed is one of the great second acts in cinema history, and it began not on the big screen but on television.

4. Kaun Banega Crorepati and the great reinvention

In 2000, Bachchan became the host of Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and the show transformed both his career and Indian television. His manner as host was the opposite of the angry young man: warm, courteous, unhurried, addressing contestants as if they were guests in his home, and the audience responded to the contrast. The show became a national ritual, families gathering to watch ordinary people answer questions for life-changing sums, and Bachchan's presence gave it a dignity and a steadiness that no other host could have supplied. He has hosted the programme across many seasons and more than two decades, and for many younger Indians he is first of all the KBC host, a figure of the living room rather than only of the cinema hall.

The television success reopened the doors of the film industry, but on new terms. Instead of returning as a romantic lead, Bachchan rebuilt himself as a character actor, taking roles that used his age, his voice and his authority. In Mohabbatein in 2000 he played a stern college principal; in Baghban in 2003 a retired father neglected by his children, a role that moved older audiences deeply; in Black in 2005, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, he played a teacher who helps a deaf-blind girl learn to communicate, a performance that won wide critical praise; and in Piku in 2015 he played a hypochondriac father with comic precision. Each of these roles was different from the last, and together they demonstrated a range that his years as an action star had partly hidden.

The reinvention also changed how Indian cinema treats its older stars. Before Bachchan's second act, leading men of his generation were expected to fade gracefully into retirement or into minor roles. He showed that an actor in his sixties and seventies could carry films, anchor a prime-time television show and remain commercially relevant, and the industry followed: the idea of the senior star as a leading creative force, rather than a nostalgic presence, owes much to his example. His longevity is not an accident of fame but a deliberate craft, built on choosing scripts carefully, working with younger directors and accepting that the hero of the story need not be young.

5. The voice, the craft and the work ethic

Ask any director who has worked with Bachchan what distinguishes him and the answer usually begins with discipline. He is known for arriving on set early, knowing his lines, and treating every production, from a big-budget spectacle to a small film, with the same seriousness. That professionalism matters in an industry where stars are often indulged, and it has allowed him to work productively with directors across generations, from Yash Chopra and Hrishikesh Mukherjee in the 1970s to Shoojit Sircar and R. Balki in the 2010s and 2020s. His willingness to be directed, to take small roles in ensemble films and to let younger actors take the spotlight, is unusual for a star of his stature and is one reason directors keep returning to him.

His voice is a second instrument. The baritone that All India Radio once rejected has narrated films, documentaries and advertisements, and his recitation of his father's poetry has become a cultural event in its own right. In films such as Lagaan, where he narrated, and in countless voiceovers, the voice carries authority without effort, and on Kaun Banega Crorepati it is the voice that sets the tone of the whole programme: calm, encouraging, never hurried. Actors such as Shah Rukh Khan, who came after him and has spoken often of Bachchan's influence, have noted that the voice is inseparable from the persona, a reminder that stardom in Indian cinema has always been as much about sound as about image.

His acting style, too, has changed across the decades. The young Bachchan of Deewaar was economical, letting silence and stillness do the work; the older Bachchan of Piku and Pink is more openly expressive, using comedy and vulnerability that the younger man rarely showed. In Pink in 2016 he played a lawyer defending three young women against a sexual assault charge, a role that connected his authority to a contemporary social question and gave the film a moral weight it would not otherwise have had. The performance showed that his stardom could still be put to use for a purpose beyond entertainment, and that audiences trusted him to carry a serious argument.

6. Honours, family and the Bachchan institution

The honours that have come to Bachchan are unusually comprehensive. He has won multiple National Film Awards, including for best actor, and numerous Filmfare Awards across decades. The Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1984, the Padma Bhushan in 2001 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2015, the country's second-highest civilian honour. In 2019 he received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the highest honour in Indian cinema, in recognition of a career that had shaped the industry itself. France made him a Knight of the Legion of Honour. These are not merely decorations; taken together they mark the distance he has travelled from a rejected radio applicant to a figure the Indian state treats as a national treasure.

His family has become an institution of its own. His wife, Jaya Bachchan, was herself a leading actress before their marriage in 1973 and later a member of parliament; their son Abhishek is an actor and their daughter Shweta a writer and former model. The Bachchan family home in Mumbai, Jalsa, is a landmark that fans visit, and the Sunday meetings at which he greets well-wishers outside his gate have become a weekly ritual. That family dimension matters to his public image: unlike many stars whose private lives are a source of scandal, Bachchan has presented a stable, private family life, and the public's affection for him includes affection for that stability.

He has also been a public voice on health and social issues, speaking about his own illnesses, including a serious bout of Covid-19 in 2020, and about organ donation, tuberculosis awareness and the polio eradication campaign, for which he was a prominent ambassador. His blog and his social media presence, which he has maintained daily for years, give him a direct line to his audience that bypasses the press, and his posts, often written late at night, mix poetry, memories of film sets and reflections on ageing. The combination of a very public career and a carefully managed private voice is part of how he has remained relevant: he is always present, but rarely overexposed.

7. Legacy: what Bachchan changed about Indian cinema

Bachchan's legacy is best understood as a change in what an Indian film hero could be. Before him, the hero was a romantic, a singer, a man whose problems were solved by love. After him, the hero could be angry, poor, morally compromised and still the centre of the film, and the audience would follow him. That shift opened the way for a more realistic, more socially engaged popular cinema, and for actors who did not fit the old mould. When Shah Rukh Khan played an obsessive anti-hero in Darr, or when later stars played flawed, working-class men, they were walking a path that Bachchan had cleared. His influence is visible not only in the films that imitated him but in the permission he gave the industry to take its audience seriously as adults.

He also changed the economics and the timescale of stardom. A career that spans more than fifty years, with a collapse and a reinvention in the middle, is rare in any film industry, and it has shown Indian producers that a star's value need not decline with age. The idea of the senior actor as a bankable lead, the growth of television as a respectable home for film stars, and the acceptance of character roles as a mark of craft rather than decline, all owe something to his example. In that sense his career is not only a personal achievement but a structural change in how Hindi cinema works.

For readers who want to understand modern India, Bachchan is a useful guide because his career tracks the country's own story: the optimism and anger of the 1970s, the turbulence of the 1980s, the economic opening and media explosion of the 1990s and 2000s, and the confident, digitised India of the present day. He has been present at every stage, and his face has been the face of each era's popular culture. That is why the title Shahenshah, emperor, given to him after a 1988 film of that name, has stuck: it describes not a role but a position, the position of the actor who has outlasted every fashion and remained, through five decades, the centre of the Indian screen.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Amitabh Bachchan
• Wikipedia — Amitabh Bachchan
• IMDb — Amitabh Bachchan
• Bollywood Hungama — Amitabh Bachchan

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• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.