Nostalgic Nuggets: This director's film was the first from south India for Oscar Awards

Looking at it realistically, it was both an advantage and a well laid-out strategy. A few directors from Tamil and Telugu movie industries specialized in multi-lingual productions and A.C. Trilogchander, born today 90 years ago ( 1930-2016) was one of them.

Those days, specifically in the decades between the 1950s-1970s, Chennai was chock-a-block with studios, production houses, star casts and everything filmi for a variety of languages from Tamil at one end and Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada having their own presence at the other.

Tirulokachander was a specialist who made films with a variety of stars – from MGR, Sivaji Ganesan and Gemini Ganesan – in Tamil, Krishna in Telugu, Rajesh Khanna in Hindi among others.

He not only remade films from other languages but had many simultaneous productions ongoing in two or three languages. He helmed close to 50 films in over three decades, one of which ' Deiva Magan ' (1969), starring Sivaji Ganesan in a triple role, went on to be nominated for Oscar Awards.