BOLLYWOOD actor Sanjay Dutt risks losing his home in Mumbai because of a dispute with a director over a half-finished film, Indian media reported on Wednesday (December 29).
The Bombay High Court ordered that two properties belonging to the popular 51-year-old actor, who made his name as a tough guy action hero, be made part of a proposed financial settlement with the filmmaker Shakeel Noorani.
Noorani has claimed that Dutt owes him Rs5m ($109,000/£70,793), which he was paid in 2001 to star in the film Jaan Ki Baazi (Life on the Line).
The film is only half finished because Dutt failed to give further dates for his availability for shooting, newspapers said.
Noorani in January took his case for recovery of the money and financial losses to arbitration at the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association (IMPPA). The body ruled in his favour when Dutt failed to appear.
The IMPPA brought the high court case and an order was passed last week to implement its terms, Noorani’s lawyer Ashok Sarogi said.
Sarogi said Dutt can either pay the money within 30 days or else his home and the office of his firm Sanjay Dutt Productions would be auctioned.
Dutt’s lawyer Satish Maneshinde said they would study the order.
The actor, whose sister is a member of India’s lower house of parliament, shot to fame in the mid-1980s and 1990s in a string of action movies in which he performed his own stunts, earning him the nickname “Deadly Dutt”.
But he has battled to regain his on-screen profile since a conviction for buying illegal weapons from the plotters of the deadly 1993 Mumbai bombings, which killed more than 250 people.
Once a heavy drug user, Dutt spent more than 18 months of a six-year prison sentence behind bars before being given bail in November 2007 pending an appeal.
He has since starred in a number of films, including the underwater odyssey Blue last year and this year’s Lamhaa (The Moment), about life in the troubled Himalayan region of Kashmir.
