Mammootty | The reason behind his collection of 369 cars

Mammootty aka Muhammad Kutty Paniparambil Ismail (born 7 September 1951), better known by his stage name Mammootty. He is an Indian film actor and producer who works in Malayalam cinema.

In a career spanning four decades, he has appeared in over 400 films, predominantly in Malayalam language and also in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and English. He has a collection of 369 cars starting from the cheapest to the most expensive.

Mammootty has built a separate garage for his cars. He mostly likes to drive the cars himself. Let us know which cars are in his collection.

The actor’s collection includes Toyota Land Cruiser LC 200, Ferrari, Mercedes and Audi models, Porsche, Toyota Fortuner, Mini Cooper S, F10 BMW 530d and 525d, E46 BMW M3, Mitsubishi Pajero Sport, Volkswagen Passat X2 and many SUV’s.

Mammootty also has an Eicher caravan which he has modified. Mammootty has a great affection for Maruti cars as his first car was a Maruti.

If we talk about Mammooty’s carrier, In this year’s Khalid Rahman directed Unda, Mammootty plays SI Manikandan, who heads a team of Kerala cops assigned to cover election duty in the Maoist Chhattisgarh. 

Manikandan is in his late 50s, a few years short of retirement, takes tablets for blood pressure, is a big brother to his young team, can only converse in his mother tongue, and is momentarily left motionless when he faces an unexpected arms attack.

He is that superior who confesses to his subordinates that he has never used a gun or chased a thief in his life. Mani sir would perhaps be the Malayalam megastar’s 30th (roughly) outing as a cop on screen and interestingly, this character is a subversion of all the previous ones.

Similarly, Amudhavan, who finds himself taking care of his spastic daughter in Ram’s Tamil film Peranbu is the nth father role he has done, in a career of more than four decades, and over 400 films.

The Telugu film Yatra, directed by Mahi V Raghav which was screened a week after Peranbu, where he is the late Chief Minister YS Rajashekara Reddy, would again be one of the many instances when he has been part of biopics.

The fourth release was Madhuraraja, a mainstream potboiler, also a sequel to his own superhit 2010 film Pokkiri Raja, where he plays a funny Malayali don from Madurai with an obsession for bad English.

Reinvention. That perhaps explains the longevity of this 68- year-old Malayalam superstar who continues to co-exist with his 33- year-old superstar son, Dulquer Salmaan, in an industry where fortunes fluctuate every Friday (and Thursday).

It is again reinvention, hard work, and an unending process of dusting and polishing his craft that makes Mammootty sustain along with the other superstar, Mohanlal, who is often conventionally eulogised as a born actor. 

“Mammootty perhaps is the only living superstar who even at this advanced stage of superstardom has managed to straddle both commercial and off-beat worlds with commendable aplomb.

This is a rare kind of hunger. While the rest of the pantheon craves for just adulation, this man wants both adulation and appreciation in equal measure,” says R Ayyappan, a journalist, who works with Manorama.

 Mammootty and Mohanlal entered almost during the same period (mid-’80s), and both flourished from the mid-’80s and ’90s with the help of writers and directors who had the ability to bring out the best in them.

But unlike Mohanlal, Mammootty’s career graph has seen colossal lows along with highs. Somewhere after the mid-’80s, when the actor was stuck in a slew of films where he played a suitcase bearing single rich dad to a toddler, his career hit a roadblock.

He was booed in theatres, films were flopping in succession, and no one from the industry wanted to touch him with a bargepole. Finally, it was a friendship that paved the way for his resurrection, the Joshiy-directed New Delhi (1987), written by Dennis Joseph, where he played a victimised journalist, G Krishnamurthy, who wreaks vengeance on his tormentors.

Like his onscreen character, Mammootty the actor was also witnessing a rebirth. After that came his first step towards reviving his image, by blurring the boundaries between commercial and art house cinema, along with a conscious effort to not get stereotyped.

It was during this time that he won his first National Award (Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha, Mathilukal) and went on to win two more, besides the Padma Shri.

Though he, along with Mohanlal, slowly shifted gears to playing alpha male heroes in films which celebrated their stardom, Mammootty continued to strike a balance.

Criticism has faithfully trailed the actor at every point of his career — particularly in his stiffness in action, comedy and dance scenes, categories his rival always excelled in.

But in 2006, he successfully busted the second charge against him in Rajamanikyam, by playing a rural buffalo seller, who spouts chaste Thiruvananthapuram slang with fantastic comic timing.

Though he is still trying to retain an ease while doing stunts, ironically one of the most iconic stylised action films in Malayalam continues to be the Amal Neerad-directed Big B (2007), headlined by Mammootty.

While the actor has delivered great performances right from the beginning of his career, there is no denying how he has determinedly restructured his craft by smoothing the apparent chinks in his armour, at every crucial phase in his four-decade old career graph.

The actor’s ability to bring goodness, helplessness, detachment, and naivety in his body language is another remarkable aspect of his performance, it was there when he played the cinema operator in Kazhcha, the immigrant Tamilian in Karutha Pakshikal, the convict in Munnariyippu or the villager in Palunku. Agrees Kumar— “I don’t think any actor channels a character’s inherent goodness better.”

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