Villupuram Chinnaiya Manrayar Ganesamoorthy, better known by his stage name Sivaji Ganesan, was an Indian actor, and producer. He was active in Tamil cinema during the latter half of the 20th century. He was known for his versatility and variety of roles depicted on screen, which gave him also the Tamil nickname Nadigar Thilagam. In a career that spanned close to five decades, he had acted 288 films in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi.