Rajadhyaksha with Shobhaa De in Mumbai in 2009. (Fotocorp)

Mumbai, Sept. 13: Bollywood stars turned up in large numbers today to say a tearful goodbye to India’s best-known celebrity portraitist Gautam Rajadhyaksha after he died at his Opera House home in south-central Mumbai. He would have turned 62 on Friday.

Rajadhyaksha, who closely documented the Mumbai glamour industry and launched many careers, suffered a heart attack this morning.

A cousin of writer-columnist Shobhaa De, Rajadhyaksha was the industry’s favourite portfolio photographer and captured several generations of Bollywood families using soft focus filters — a style he popularised in film photography decades ago.

From Durga Khote and Shobhana Samarth, two doyennes of Indian cinema, to the current pack of Bollywood heroes led by Ranbir Kapoor, he had photographed them all.

As news of his death spread, a shocked Bollywood gathered at his residence. Karan Johar, who used Rajadhyaksha’s soft focus stills for the publicity of Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham, was there.

Kajol, Shobhana Samarth’s granddaughter who had made her debut in the 1992 film Bekhudi scripted by Rajadhyaksha, came with her mother Tanuja.

Prateik Babbar, whose mother Smita Patil was one of Rajadhyaksha’s earliest muses, dropped the promotion of his film My Friend Pinto and rushed to the crematorium.

Ashutosh Gowariker, Tabu, Raveena Tandon, Juhi Chawla, Rani Mukherji, Rishi Kapoor, Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Tina Ambani and photographer Dabbu Ratnani came to pay respects.

Javed Akhtar tweeted: “Gautam was my friend from 70s. all childhood pictures of Zoya and Farhan in our albums are by him.”

Warring cousins Raj and Uddhav condoled the photographer known to be close to the Thackeray family.

After graduating in chemistry from St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, Rajadhyaksha taught the subject for a few years before taking up a copywriter’s job with Lintas in the early 1970s when it was the leading ad agency. He saw closely the work of advertising photography stalwarts like Vilas Bhende, Jehangir Kaazdar and Mitter Bedi and took to photography full time at the agency from 1977.

He did some initial photo shoots with college friends like Shabana Azmi before cousin Shobhaa De asked him to write for Celebrity magazine, which she edited. Rajadhyaksha began taking pictures along with his stories on cinema, and soon began contributing photographs to magazines like The Illustrated Weekly of India, Stardust, Cine Blitz and Filmfare.

In 1997, Rajadhyaksha released a coffee table book titled Faces, which contained portraits of 45 film personalities. Actresses Nutan and Madhuri Dixit, whom he photographed in 69 photo-shoots, were his favourite portrait subjects though he also shot musicians, writers, sports personalities and industrialists.

A black and white silhouetted portrait of Sachin Tendulkar seated on a chair, throwing up a ball in the air, is one of his iconic pictures. Recalling it in an interview, Rajadhyaksha said: “I asked Sachin to throw the ball in the air. I was looking at the ball as the earth and wanted to capture it like he was playing with the earth….”

Painter M.F. Husain, dressed in a white kurta-pyjama and seated on the ground at Gateway of India surrounded by pigeons, is another memorable photograph.

“Gautam’s soft focus style was unique, and there was a time when people in the glamour industry felt that unless he shot their portfolio, their career would not be launched,” Shobhaa De said.

In a tribute on twitter, Amitabh Bachchan wrote “…Many of his pictures adorn our house and our books....”

Rajadhyaksha was also a Western and Indian classical music scholar and had a huge collection of opera recordings. He was working on a book on the history of opera singing. “He used to like opera and had a sound knowledge of classical ragas,” said Lata Mangeshkar.