They call him King Khan. Meet Bollywood's biggest star

I have been waiting for Shah Rukh Khan in the lobby of a central London hotel for an hour. The PR looks apologetic. "He's not very good in the mornings," she says. What can he be doing? His hair? Maybe it's just that he is the biggest film star in the world and that is enough of a reason in itself to keep people waiting. In this country, few people outside Asian communities and Bollywood fans have heard of him (he sells out Wembley arena in minutes when he comes here to perform song-and-dance routines from his films). Shah Rukh Khan (also known as "King Khan") has been in more than 50 Hindi films and has won 13 Filmfare awards, regarded as the "Bollywood Oscars". He is the biggest star in Hindi cinema and this means billions of fans (Bollywood has a global audience of 3.6 billion; Hollywood has 2.5 billion). In India, where he lives with his wife and two children in Mumbai, he can't leave his house without six bodyguards (the hysteria that follows him makes Beatle-mania look like a librarians' convention). When he finally does appear, he is dressed in a black suit and an expensive white shirt and is shorter than I expect. His hair is a deep black, puffed up and slicked back - perhaps this really is why he is late - and he smells delicious, all fruity and woody (he has his own perfume). He is softly spoken and holds my tape recorder up to his mouth during the whole interview, like a microphone, and talks into it with an accent that bobs gently up and down like a boat on a calm sea. I start to swoon, but that might be all the coffee I have drunk while waiting for him. We meet days after the train bombings in Mumbai which killed 207 people; an Islamist group claimed responsibility. As one of India's most high-profile Muslims, Khan hasn't experienced any backlash. "I'm not religious in terms of reading namaz [prayer] five times but I am Islamic," he says. "I believe in the tenets of Islam and I believe that it's a good religion and a good discipline. There are a lot of people who misinterpret Islam, some in terms of understanding, others in terms of their actions. We need to somehow arrest the thought of violence, we can't only keep on arresting people [after terrorist attacks] because they are nameless, faceless zombies." Khan is in London because Bafta is hosting a Bollywood weekend. (Later, I go to the Bafta headquarters for the party to launch the weekend and when Khan appears, grown women rush towards him squealing.) The Indian film industry is the most prolific in the world - some 900 films are produced every year. In 2004, the industry was worth $4.5bn (£2.4bn) and it is expected to grow at 18% every year. In a country where nearly 80% of the population live on less than $2 a day, cinema provides an escape (some tickets cost mere pennies). It also provides an important cultural link for the Indian diaspora - the 20 million non-resident Indians, some second and third generation who might never have visited India. In the UK, the most successful Bollywood films regularly take more than £2m at the box office, and Khan has starred in eight of the 10 highest grossing. Bollywood films do cross over into mainstream western cinema - Lagaan, starring Aamir Khan, was nominated for an Oscar in 2002 and Devdas, a romantic tragedy starring Shah Rukh Khan, was nominated for a Bafta and was the first Hindi film to be shown at Cannes - but for an average western viewer, Bollywood films still seem alien. In most, there are three hours of overacting, clunky dubbing, storylines as cheesy as mutter paneer, song-and-dance routines and dream sequences. In recent films, costumes are stuck somewhere in 1985. "I keep hearing that our films are escapist and unreal but I find our films the most real in the world," says Khan. "We don't have people going up in a rocket and single-handedly blowing up a meteor. We don't have a president on Air Force One saving the world or things coming out of people's stomachs. Our fantasies and escapism are real. It's just people singing and dancing in the street. If England had won the World Cup you would have seen people singing and dancing like that." Khan lives in a huge white mansion behind gates in Mumbai's most expensive area with his wife Gauri, 35, son Aryan, eight, and daughter Suhana, six. He has six bodyguards but he only needs two when he is in London (his "people" won't allow him to go on a walkabout in Brick Lane or Southall because they would need police to control the inevitable crowds). He travels in cars with blacked-out windows. Doesn't he miss having a normal life? "I don't want to have a normal life," he says. "[Actors work] half their life to get recognised, then spend half their life wearing dark glasses so people don't recognise them. I don't like wearing dark glasses. I'm happy with the fact that people know me. I want people to scream and shout at me, I want people to trouble me when I'm having lunch, I like six bodyguards around me. I love being a star. I find it very strange when people who are famous say they don't want to be photographed. I don't want to be photographed first thing in the morning, I don't want people peeping into my bedroom, but besides that, it's a wonderful life." He is not an obvious Bollywood hero. He can dance but he can't sing (his songs are dubbed) and he is not as good-looking as other Bollywood stars such as Hrithik Roshan. Charisma, of which he has tons, can surely get you only so far. Why is he so successful? "I don't know," he says, and I'm surprised because many people have told me that he is famously arrogant. "My actor friends keep telling me I'm the longest-running fluke they know." Unlike many Hindi cinema stars who come from film dynasties, Khan is self-made. He was born in Delhi. His father ran a transport company and his mother was a magistrate, and Khan went to a private school. He was 15 when his father died from cancer; his treatment had been expensive and the family business collapsed. His mother worked day and night to build the business back up but never insisted Khan follow her into it (she died before Khan became famous). He didn't grow up wanting to be an actor - he played cricket and hockey but injuries put a stop to that - though he did watch a lot of films. "We watched every Indian movie but I was more into MTV, Flashdance, Bill Cosby. For me, Indian movies were a little loud and garish; quite tacky." The first film he saw after he graduated (with a degree in economics) that made him think he wanted to be an actor was Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, a film about star-crossed lovers, starring Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla. "I didn't think I was as good-looking or as cool as they were, but somehow I felt I could do it." By then, he had met Gauri, a model from a Hindu family. Their romance was the stuff of a million Bollywood scripts - her family weren't keen on Khan, but he won them over with charm. After moving to Mumbai, Khan landed a role in a soap opera and then came to the attention of Bollywood casting directors. "I was told many times that I couldn't be a romantic hero because I was married," he says. "I was told not to tell anyone." I scoured the internet for scandal about him but could find nothing. "I'm just good at hiding things," he says and smiles. "I have security. There are nude women, and animals also, but nobody gets to see it." He works with some of the most beautiful women in the world. Doesn't his wife ever feel threatened? "When you go through a profession like this for 16 years without having other women saying they are bearing my child, I think that's long enough to say, 'I don't think he's going to wander off now.' My liking and respect for women is so immense, it goes far beyond just getting into their beds." Most Bollywood films are still chaste - until quite recently, sex scenes consisted of shots of petals rubbing against each other, bees sucking honey from a flower or the rustle of a bush to denote anything more passionate than a peck on the cheek - and Khan never kisses his lovers in a film. "I feel shy doing it," he says. "I feel uncomfortable with so many people watching. If I'm uncomfortable doing it, it will look odd and I'll never be happy watching it." How long will he get to play the romantic lead, though? He is 40 and, although he looks young, he confesses to dying his hair. He is Bollywood's most bankable star but there are new, younger actors coming through. Last year wasn't Khan's best. His only release, Paheli, didn't do as well as expected, despite being India's official entry to the Academy Awards, so this year is crucial if he is to hold on to his "King Khan" status. Things look hopeful - he stars in Karan Johar's Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye), out in the UK next Friday and already this year's most expensive Bollywood film. "I have had such success, I would be being ungrateful if I started being competitive," he says. "In my heart and my mind, I get up in the morning thinking there is nobody making a better film than I do. I say that to myself because I have to work that much harder." It is hard to work out how much of a fortune Khan has amassed (he won't say, but it is vast). Does he ever feels uneasy that he has so much? "I'm hard-working in terms of what I do for money. I don't take money for a lot of things, in spite of what people think," he says, although like most Bollywood stars, he promotes a range of products, from soft drinks to watches to soap, and he was reportedly paid £300,000 to dance at the wedding of the son of the steel billionaire Lakshmi Mittal. "I'm wealthy because I work fast and earn fast. I don't sit back. I do a lot for people - I build stuff for people and I look after the sick - but I don't talk about my wealth and the wealth I give to the poor. And it's not out of guilt. Somewhere in the Qur'an it says that if you do charity for a reason, it's not charity." He says he never wanted to move Hollywood, although he has gone to meet producers. "It's not as if Steven Spielberg is waiting for me at LA airport," he says. "There are actors in Hollywood who look better than me, speak better than me, act better than me. Maybe not dance as well as I do. But apart from that I don't think there's any reason why I should be cast." I don't think he needs any more fans - half the world's population know who he is. "I want to be famous all over the world," he says, then corrects himself. "Actually, I want Indian films to be famous all over the world".