Actor-filmmaker Tinnu Anand has revealed how megastar Amitabh Bachchan “nearly died” after he was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, a rare chronic autoimmune disease that leads to muscular weakness. Anand said that this happened while Bachchan was filming Coolie, on the sets of which he was critically injured in the intestines while filming a fight scene with co-star Puneet Issar.

Tinnu Anand had locked Amitabh Bachchan for his ambitious film Shahenshah. The film was ready to go on floors in Ooty with a 10-day schedule having been set in place. The unit was ready, and all advances had been paid, when just a day before filming, the filmmaker received a call from Bachchan. The superstar asked him to come to Mysore, where he was filming Coolie. “I was told by the Manmohan Desai unit that he has gotten injured and was taken to Bengaluru for checkup. ‘He has asked you to come to Bengaluru,’ they told me, so I went there. This time, I was on tenterhooks: Is he going to be well for my schedule?

“I kept waiting at the hotel, where he arrived and said, ‘Please sit down, I have a bad news for you. I have been diagnosed with a nerve illness. During the shoot when I was taking a sip of the water, it got stuck in my throat, because the message to my brain didn’t go that I had to swallow it.’ He then said, ‘I nearly died suffocating on it,'” Anand recalled in an interview with Radio Nasha.

The filmmaker, who had worked with Bachchan in Kaalia, said that the megastar was asked to go to Mumbai for further checkup and was advised “complete rest.”

He continued, “He told me that the doctors have warned him that he may never be able to work again. I just collapsed listening to this! Few days later, Mr Khalid Mohammed wrote that he had a meeting with Amitabh, who told him, ‘Sorry, I have to give up on acting.’ So, Shehanshaah was dropped.”

Later, however, everything aligned after some back and forth, and Shehanshaah went on floors with Bachchan and Meenakshi Sheshadri. With a story by Jaya Bachchan, Shehanshaah was one of the highest grossers of 1988.

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