Rajinikanth & Manorama Movies Together List — 18 Films

The shape of the work

The 1980s account for 61% of everything they made together. The 1970s belonged to Aayiram Jenmangal; the 1990s to Annamalai. Rajinikanth acted in every film; Manorama acted in all of them.

Partnership facts

• Their first film together, Shankar Salim Simon (1978), was a comedy where Rajinikanth played a Christian and Manorama played his mother. The director, P. Madhavan, paired them because he wanted a natural, no-nonsense mother-son dynamic — and Manorama, already a veteran, was the only one who could match Rajini's speed on set.
• Manorama was the only co-star who regularly improvised dialogue against Rajinikanth's signature style. In Thee (1981), she ad-libbed a whole comedic rant during a tense scene, and Rajini broke character laughing — the director kept the take because it felt real.
• Off-screen, Manorama called Rajinikanth 'Thambi' (younger brother) and he called her 'Akkai' (elder sister). She was the one who taught him how to time a punchline in comedy scenes — a skill he later credited for his mass appeal.
• Their 1983 film Paayum Puli was the first Tamil movie where a female comedian (Manorama) got a full-length parallel comedy track that ran alongside the hero's storyline. That film directly inspired the trend of 'comedy duos' in Tamil cinema for the next decade.
• Rajinikanth once said in a 1992 interview: 'Manorama akka can make me forget my lines just by looking at me. I have to work twice as hard to keep up with her.'
• In Naan Adimai Illai (1986), a film that tanked at the box office, Manorama's character was the only one who consistently outsmarted Rajinikanth's hero — a rare dynamic where the comedian wasn't just comic relief but the intellectual equal of the lead.