Siddharth Randeria

His father, Madhukar Randeria, was a Gujarati writer and stage actor, so the profession was in the house before he chose it. He has been in theatre since 1970, when he was fourteen, and made his stage debut in the lead of Chako Mako. In the decades since he has taken awards as a writer, a director and an actor, which is a different sort of career from being a much loved comic.

The number that separates him from everyone else is the performance count. He has crossed twelve thousand live performances, the most of any Gujarati actor. Films are shot once and released everywhere. Twelve thousand shows means turning up twelve thousand times, in front of twelve thousand different rooms, and getting it right in real time on each of them.

The Gujjubhai plays were built the way a franchise is built rather than the way a hit happens. Lage Raho Gujjubhai, staged in 2007, completed eight hundred shows in three years across the world. Gujjubhai ni Golmaal, from 2012, did three hundred and fifty shows internationally. Gujjubhai Banya Dabangg completed five hundred and five shows in eighteen months. Lo Gujjubhai Ghode Chadya, Rang Rangila Gujjubhai and Bluffmaster Gujjubhai followed.

One detail is left out here deliberately. English Wikipedia gives the starting year of the series as 2002 in its prose and 2003 in its own list of plays, so the year the first Gujjubhai play opened is not stated on this page. The show counts, which are consistent across the page, are.

Gujjubhai The Great released on 18 September 2015, directed by his son Ishaan Randeria and produced in association with Siddharth Randeria Productions, with Randeria playing Hasmukh Gandhi. He was fifty nine years old and forty five years into a stage career. Very few actors anywhere start a film career at that age with an audience already assembled and a character the audience already recognises.

The sequel, GujjuBhai Most Wanted, came in 2018, also directed by Ishaan. In between he took a cameo as Mehta in Wrong Side Raju in 2016, the film that won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati, which put the biggest name in Gujarati theatre in a supporting slot of the new wave's most serious film. That is not a man protecting a brand.

In 2018 he made Natsamrat, the Gujarati film about an actor forced into retirement at his peak. It is a remake of the Marathi film that starred Nana Patekar, and Randeria had already adapted the same material for the Gujarati stage in 2007 as Amari Duniya, Tamari Duniya, with Jimmit Trivedi and Disha Savla-Upadhyay. So he came to the Marathi story through the theatre first and the camera second.

Then it went the other way. Chaal Jeevi Laiye!, released on 1 February 2019, cast him as Bipin Chandra Parikh, a father with a terminal diagnosis taking his workaholic son to Kedarnath. It reportedly grossed about Rs 50 crore, ran fifty weeks in cinemas, and held the all time Gujarati record until 2025. In 2024 the same writer and director, Vipul Mehta, and the same producer remade it in Marathi as Ole Aale, with Nana Patekar in the father's role. Randeria had played Patekar's part in Gujarati; six years later Patekar played Randeria's.

The film work has not thinned since. Kehvatlal Parivar in 2022, then four Gujarati releases in 2023 alone, Bushirt T-shirt, Bachubhai, Hu ane Tu and Hurry Om Hurry, then Bachu Ni Benpani in 2025 and Jai Kanhaiyalall Ki in 2026. He has also appeared in Hindi films including Khalnayak, Kya Kehna, Shortkut and Satyaprem Ki Katha, and in Hindi television.

None of it replaced the theatre. That is the whole point of him. Most performers use the stage to reach the screen and then stop returning calls from the stage. He built the screen career as an extension of the stage business he already owned, and he has never handed the original back.