'Chiyaan' Vikram turns 54, son puts out a video on Insta

Among the late bloomers in southern cinema who went on to enjoy an unchallenged niche for himself for a few years, Kennedy John Victor, known by his screen name Vikram is a story on his own. On April 17, as he turned 54, his son Dhruv, an actor himself, put out a 90-second video on Insta on the star's life and times. It has already been viewed by nearly 3 lakh, at the time of writing.

Senior to the current day top draws like Vijay and Ajith Kumar (having made his debut in 1990), Vikram worked in relative anonymity for close to a decade in Telugu and Malayalam films. This was before 'Sethu' catapulted him into the top round of Tamil cinema in 1999. For the next five years or so, his films were of those varieties which were helmed by directors like Shankar, who featured him twice in his productions.

Two decades down the line, Vikram is no more in the first round of superheroes who have managed to hold on to their slippery slots, despite wavy box-office responses to their films. Yet he has stuck on, doing projects with a few of the older directors like Gautham Vasudev Menon who still find him good enough. His son Dhruv's s remake of 'Arjun Reddy', a launch film, however, did not set the Cooum on fire.