Bollywood megastar Bachchan mourns mentor

Prakash Mehra, a Bollywood producer-director best known for launching the career of megastar Amitabh Bachchan, has died, Indian media reported Monday.

Mehra, who shunned the glitz and glamour of the Bollywood party circuit, died in hospital in Mumbai on Sunday from pneumonia and multiple organ failure. He was 69.

His long working relationship with Bachchan began in 1973 in "Zanjeer," a film about an honest police officer who takes on underworld gangs.

The film made an overnight of star of Bachchan, who until then had failed to make his mark in more than a dozen films and had been planning to give up on the movie industry.

Bachchan earned the tag of "angry young man" and went on to star in a string of hits overseen by Mehra, including "Herapheri" (1976), "Muqaddar Ka Sikandar" (1978), "Lawaaris" (1981), "Namak Halal" (1982) and "Sharabi" (1984).

Mehra was largely credited with bringing gritty violence to India's Hindi-language film industry that until then was known more for romance-themed and family-orientated movies.

He fell out of favour in the 1990s when romantic drama made a comeback, notably with actors like Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan.

Bachchan paid tribute to his mentor in the Bombay Times newspaper Monday.

"Prakash Mehra was an all-rounder in his craft. He was first a writer and coming from the north had great sense of the language and its temperament. He was a simple man who had come from very humble beginnings," he wrote.

"His commercial successes never ever betrayed his respect for the people that he grew up with or with those that remained with him during his phenomenal journey. We have lost a great filmmaker and a wonderful human."