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Veteran Marathi and Bollywood films, television and theatre actor Ashok Saraf will be conferred with the coveted ‘Maharashtra Bhushan’ Award-2023, Chief Minister Eknath Shinde said here on Tuesday.

Saraf, 76, has been selected for his substantial contribution to the field of arts. He has straddled from comedy to serious to villainous roles through his acting and won the hearts of the audiences.

Saraf started his acting career in 1969 with the Marathi film ‘Janaka’. Since then, he has worked in over 250 Marathi films, mostly in comic roles, besides acting in more than 50 Bollywood movies and 10 television serials, along with a dozen theatre productions. He has teamed with up actors like Laxmikant Berde and Sachin Pilgaonkar in different films.

Some of the prominent Bollywood films in which Saraf could be seen include ‘Damaad’, ‘Pratighat’, ‘Benaam Badshah’, ‘Aa Gale Lag Ja’, ‘Karan Arjun’, ‘Army’, ‘Koyla’, ‘Gupt’, ‘Yes Boss’, ‘Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya’, ‘Khubsoorat’, ‘Joru Ka Gulam’, ‘Jodi No.

Tom Holland's 1988 film "Child's Play" was initially meant to be a satire of the commercial madness that swept the world when Cabbage Patch Kids proliferated through the marketplace a few years before. What if, "Child's Play" asked, the soul of a vicious serial killer possessed your ultra-hot Christmas toy? The result was a genuinely creepy supernatural thriller about a young boy named Andy (Alex Vincent) his single mom (Catherine Hicks) and the mysterious Good Guy doll who likely contains the personality of Charles Lee "Chucky" Ray (Brad Dourif), known to the police as the Lakeshore Strangler.

Like many of the slasher films of the 1980s, "Child's Play" was extensively sequelized. The mythos of Chucky the killer doll expanded, leading to strange byzantine rules of voodoo magic (Chucky uses a magical amulet and magic spells to shunt his soul into a doll body), as well as inter-doll mating, and a lot of queerness.

’Rrr’ has struck a chord with foreign audiences and its song, ‘Naatu Naatu’, with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, which awards the Oscars. Wish there was a category for choreography as well at the Oscars, for, I think, that has created the magic that ‘Naatu Naatu’ has become known for.

We had Richard Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’ and, later, Danny Boyle’s ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, both of which made it big at the Oscars. We were thrilled about it. But they were not the products of any of the Indian film industries. They merely had India-related stories.

Quite a few other filmmakers tried for nominations at the Oscars

The earlier one was Mehboob Khan’s ‘Mother India’. They probably did not identify with a woman refusing to compromise even while her kids were starving. It was the post-World War II era and there were stories about women known to compromise...

Superstar Salman Khan has worked with Laxmikant Berde a number of times. He says the late actor was one of the biggest reasons for the success of their 1989 film "Maine Pyar Kiya".

Salman recently shot for an episode of the show "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Li'l Champs" where he opened up about his former co-star, read a statement.

Contestant Ritik Gupta performed to "Tumse milne ki tamanna hai" from Salman's film "Saajan", which left the actor emotional.

Salman shared: "This song has a lot of beautiful memories attached to it. This song is from our movie 'Saajan', which was a big hit. This was my introduction song in the movie along with my very close friend Laxmikant Berde. I have done a lot of movies with him and I think he was one of the biggest reasons behind the success of 'Maine Pyar Kiya'."

"This...