Dr Rajkumar's Malli Maduve Was Written By First Tamil Nadu CM

Perhaps nobody would believe if we said that Kannada matinee idol Dr Rajkumar had acted in a dual role in a movie Which was released in 1963.

This revelation may not be believed by the present generation but the fact is a Kannada movie by name "Malli maduve" which had a huge star cast during sixties was a hit movie.

This was a remake of the Tamil movie by name "velaikkari" which had a run for 100 days and was a super hit movie. After this, Tamil movies became more popular in Karnataka. The script was adapted from a drama Which was written by Anna dorai who was the chief minister of Tamil Nadu.

When Annadorai was requested to write a screenplay for that drama, he had finished it in a span of three days and lo and behold it ran into about thousand pages. The movie had created a new wave in the Tamil film industry and the movie gave a different direction to the cinema industry, it is being said.

The movie had proved that cinema screenplay writer were bigger stars than the heroes of that period. The name of the story writers used to appear on the screen before the title of the movies during title cards display! Velaikkari was remade in Hindi as "Naya Admi" in 1956, as " Santosham" in Telugu", in which N T Ramarao was in the lead role.

But the Telugu version was not successful. An interesting thing about the kannada version was that Dr Rajkumar had appeared in dual role. But it had failed to draw the attention of the audience as Raj's dual portion was shown only for three seconds in the movie. After velaikkari dual roles, and court scenes became a trend in the movies. Dr Rajkumar, Uday Kumar, Leelavathi and other prominent stars had worked in this movie. Later, Velaikkari gave room to good dialogue writers in Tamil movies.