Sunil Dutt was first angry young man: Amitabh Bachchan

Megastar Amitabh Bachchan, who earned the tag of “Angry Young Man” after his films ‘Zanjeer’ and ‘Namak Haraam’, believes the first actor to hold the title is not him but Sunil Dutt who portrayed an angry Birju in the 1957-epic ‘Mother India’.
In the Mehboob Khan-directed ‘Mother India’, Sunil Dutt played the rebel son of a woman, played by Nargis, who works hard for survival with her two sons after her husband disappears.
“`Namak Haram` bore seeds of the anger that was next seen in `Zanjeer`, and the subsequent titling of the epithet `Angry Young Man` by the media,” Big B wrote on his Facebook page.
“But I have always believed that the first powerful depiction or in a sense the birth of the so called `Angry Young Man`, was designed by Mehboob Saheb (Mehboob Khan) in `Mother India`, where the character Birju, played so brilliantly by Sunil Dutt, was depicted,” he wrote.
While `Zanjeer` featured Amitabh as inspector Vijay Khanna, `Namak Haraam` saw him as Vikram Maharaj.