21 October 2012 :: Yash Raj Chopra , famous film maker passes away after a brief battle with illness in Mumbai at the age of 80. He was an Indian film director, screenwriter and film producer, predominantly working in Hindi cinema. Chopra began his career as an assistant director to I.S. Johar and his elder brother, B.R. Chopra. He made his directorial debut with Dhool Ka Phool in 1959, a melodrama about illegitimacy and followed it with the hard-hitting social drama Dharmputra (1961). Encouraged by the success of both films, the Chopra brothers made several more movies together during the late fifties and sixties. Chopra then rose to prominence after the commercially and critically successful drama, Waqt (1965), which pioneered the concept of multi-starters in Bollywood.
Chopra was born on 27 September 1932 in Lahore, British India (now in Pakistan), to a Punjabi family. The youngest of eight children, the oldest of whom was almost 30 years his senior, he was largely brought up in the Lahore house of his second brother, B.R Chopra, then a film journalist. Chopra went to Jullundur in 1945 to continue his education and later moved to Ludhiana in Punjab (in India) after the partition. He was originally ought to pursuit a career in engineering. However, his passion for filmmaking led him to travel to Bombay (now Mumbai) where he initially worked as an assistant director to I. S. Johar, and then for his director-producer brother, B.R. Chopra.
