The first thing that impresses you about this National award winner is his striking humility despite having ruled the box office as a 'Dancing star' during the 70s to the 90s.

''Life for me has been a struggle all through. All through my career, I have preferred to maintain a low profile. In fact, I consider myself fortunate that I have managed to keep afloat for so long,'' thrice National award winner Mithun Chakraborty says.

Coming from an actor who, during his film career, achieved a lot of commercial success (a huge fan following among the masses earned for him the epithets of the 'poor man's Amitabh' and the 'Badshah' of B-grade films) and tremendous critical acclaim (winning National Awards thrice), for his performances in his first film 'Mrigaya' as well as for Bengali films 'Tahader Katha' and 'Ramakrishna Paramhans'), Mithun's statement evidences the humility of one who has 'come up the hard way'.

Looking at Mithun humbly responding to the pleas of newspersons at the capital last evening, during a trip to promote his latest film, Vikram Bhatt's 'Elaan' which is tipped to be his comeback film, it seems hard to believe that he is the same person who, in his heydays, earned a huge fan following as a 'dancing star', one who runs a parallel film industry from his South Indian abode of Ooty, is 'God' for a generation of audiences unaware of the Hrithik Roshans and the Sanjay Dutts of this world, who owns an entire chain of hotels in Ooty and one who, was the highest tax payer in the country for five consecutive years, from 1994 to 1999.

Talking about his long absence from Hindi films and his reasons for taking up Vikram Bhatt's 'Elaan', which releases this Friday, Mithun said,''for every actor, there comes a time when he feels that he has nothing left to achieve. It just happened with me that at one point I felt that I had stopped growing as an actor. Now, several years later, when Vikram approached me with this offer of a negative role in 'Elaan', it excited my curiosity.''

In the 'lavishly mounted' action film, which also features John Abrahim, Arjun Rampal, Lara Dutta, Rahul Khanna and Amisha Patel, Mithun plays the role of an underworld don Baba Sikandar who runs an extortion racket and whose tentacles spread far across the globe.