Tiger Prabhakar

Tiger Prabhakar Biography

Tiger Prabhakar was a popular Kannada actor who has played both antagonist and protagonist roles and is regarded as an icon in Karnataka. He is better known for introducing Kanglish – a mixture of English and Kannada dialogues into Kannada movies and still now mimicry artists recite his famous Kanglish dialogues. He has acted in about 400 movies and has produced two commercial hits - Mahendra Varma and Mister Mahesh kumar. He has also directed a couple of movies, Bombay Dada and King. Film heroines, Anju and Jayamala were his ex-wives.

Though he has been mostly associated with Kannada cinema, he has also appeared in Hindi and Malayalam movies. He gave life to immortal character Hyder Marakkar, the antogonist in Mammootty starrer Malayalam movie, ‘Dhruvam’ in 1993. He also appeared in Amitabh Bachchan – Sridevi starrer Bollywood movie, Inquilaab. This actor has married thrice and all these marriages ended in divorces. He was married to south Indian heroines – Anju and Jayamala. Kannada actor Vinod Prabhakar was born from his first marriage. Though his personal life was full of troubles, he was known as a philanthropist who gave huge sums of money to charity organisations. He died at a comparatively young age of 52 in 2001.

He was born as Prabhakar in Sagara of Mysore in 1948. He started his career by doing negative roles in B-graded movies. He mostly appeared in stunt, action, and thriller movies. His career breakthrough was the role of Tiger in Yaare Saakshi, which earned him the name Tiger Prabhakar. After that he was addressed by this name. Part from doing positive roles, he played negative roles in many Chiranjeevi's films which earned him the name, "Kannada Prabhakar".

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Updated: May 06, 2014