Glamorous stars mix Bollywood with busine

Stung by the penniless end of some of Bollywood's former giants, a new generation of Indian movie stars is turning entrepreneurial to cushion the financial blow of life away from the limelight.

Even with the Bollywood movie industry tipped to grow at 16 per cent a year to 2010, actors have opened restaurants and launched fashion and hotel chains to invest the earnings from their precarious movie careers.

Not all have been successful. India's biggest star Amitabh Bachchan's production house folded with losses of 900 million rupees (US$20 million) in the late 1990s, but a number have emerged successfully, aided by a dash of glamour and a ready following of fans turned customer.

Bollywood stars showed little acumen for businesses until the 1990s but the opening of India's economy has encouraged many to put their own money behind their business plans.

One of the pioneers was Mithun Chakraborty, a leading Bollywood actor of the 1980s who started his own hotel business in southern India.

"I made this move when the going was good for me in the film industry. I was one of the top actors then and was doing very well in my career," he says.

"But at the time I wondered, 'what will happen to me after the lights, camera and action go?' I needed to do something other than acting and therefore I decided to venture into the hotel business."

Since Chakraborty, many have followed including actor Bobby Deol, who has opened a chain of restaurants in the western metropolis of Mumbai.

Former Miss World and Bollywood actress, Sushmita Sen, launched her own company with plans to make movies and enter the hotel and health spa industry.

Some actors cite the cases of former greats of Indian screen, who died penniless and lonely after extravagant spending during their successful years drove them into poverty.

The 1950s superstar Bhagwan rose to fame from a childhood in a one-room home in Mumbai but a string of investments meant he died in the 1990s poor again and broken-hearted.