Bachchan was born on October 11, 1942, in Allahabad, to Harivansh Rai Bachchan, a celebrated Hindi poet, and Teji Bachchan, a social activist. His original surname was “Shrivastava,” but his father wrote under the pen name “Bachchan” (meaning “child”), and the family later adopted it as their surname. He was educated at Sherwood College, Nainital, and Kirori Mal College, Delhi University, and briefly worked as a freight broker in Kolkata before moving to Mumbai in the late 1960s to pursue acting. He married actress Jaya Bhaduri in 1973; the couple have two children, Shweta Bachchan Nanda and actor Abhishek Bachchan, who later married actress Aishwarya Rai, making Bachchan the father-in-law of one of Bollywood’s most prominent leading women.

Bachchan’s early films in the late 1960s and early 1970s met with little success, and he was reportedly rejected by All India Radio for having a voice deemed unsuitable for broadcast — an irony given the deep baritone that later became one of his defining assets. His breakthrough came with “Zanjeer” (1973), which established the brooding, justice-seeking “Angry Young Man” persona that came to define an era of Hindi cinema. Landmark films including “Sholay” (1975), “Deewaar” (1975), “Amar Akbar Anthony” (1977), and “Don” (1978) cemented him as India’s biggest box-office draw through the late 1970s and 1980s, a period in which the Indian press often called him a “one-man industry.”

Bachchan’s film career has spanned genres from action and drama to comedy and, in later decades, character-actor roles in films such as “Black” (2005), “Paa” (2009), “Piku” (2015), which won him a National Film Award, and “Pink” (2016). Alongside acting, he became a household name of a different kind in 2000 when he began hosting “Kaun Banega Crorepati” (KBC), the Indian adaptation of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” a role he has held for most of its run across more than fifteen seasons. He has also worked as a playback singer and narrator, and in 2019 was awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, Indian cinema’s highest honor, alongside the Padma Vibhushan (2015) and Padma Bhushan (2001).

Indian business and entertainment publications have repeatedly named Bachchan among the country’s highest individual taxpayers, with reports estimating his annual income in recent years at roughly INR 300-350 crore (approximately $36-42 million), drawn mainly from KBC hosting fees, endorsement contracts, and selective film roles. Exact figures are not disclosed publicly, so these estimates are compiled from tax-filing reports and trade press.

Bachchan’s per-film fees have varied widely by project and era, with trade publications reporting figures of several crore rupees per film for his recent character roles — well below his blockbuster-era peak but still among the highest commanded by a veteran actor. His most consistent and reportedly largest single income source has been his “Kaun Banega Crorepati” hosting fee, estimated by trade outlets at multiple crore rupees per episode, making the show one of the most lucrative hosting gigs in Indian television.

Bachchan is widely described in Indian marketing press as the country’s most prolific and trusted celebrity brand ambassador, having fronted campaigns for a long list of major companies over more than three decades, including Cadbury Dairy Milk (since 2004), Emami’s Navratna Oil, Kalyan Jewellers, Tanishq, Dabur, Pepsi, Gujarat Tourism, upGrad, Flipkart, and numerous other national and regional brands, alongside public health campaigns such as those for polio eradication. Reported per-campaign fees for a celebrity of his stature are typically estimated in the crores of rupees, though individual contract values are rarely disclosed publicly.

Photo: Studio Harcourt via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

In the mid-1990s, Bachchan founded Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited (ABCL), an ambitious venture into film production and event management that included producing the Miss World 1996 pageant in Bangalore. ABCL ran into severe financial difficulty within a few years, and by the early 2000s Bachchan was reported by Indian media to be facing debts of roughly INR 90 crore and dozens of related legal cases, at one point mortgaging his home. He has publicly credited filmmaker Yash Chopra, who cast him in “Mohabbatein” (2000), and the launch of KBC that same year with helping him rebuild his finances and repay his creditors — a recovery frequently cited in Indian business media as one of the most dramatic comebacks by a public figure in the country. In more recent years, he has held equity stakes and brand-linked investments in Indian companies, though he is not primarily known as an active business operator today.

The Bachchan family owns a cluster of bungalows on the same street in Mumbai’s Juhu neighborhood, most notably “Jalsa,” Amitabh Bachchan’s primary residence and one of the most photographed private homes in India, alongside neighboring family properties known as “Prateeksha” (the family’s first Mumbai home), “Janak,” and “Vatsa.” Real estate outlets have estimated Jalsa’s value at over INR 100 crore, though as a long-held family property it has not been sold or independently appraised. The family also holds additional Mumbai real estate and a collection of vehicles typical of a business owner of his profile; exact current holdings are not independently confirmed.