Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's screen career is a documentary record, not a filmography in the Hollywood sense. His earliest significant public exposure came through his 1959 world tour and the years of lectures and darshans — public spiritual audiences — that followed. Those appearances were captured on film and tape, forming the raw material that documentarians would draw on for decades. The real breakthrough, culturally speaking, came in the late 1960s. The Beatles traveled to Rishikesh in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation under him — and suddenly the Maharishi was everywhere, on magazine covers, in newsreels, in the kind of footage that ends up in every retrospective documentary about the decade. The Beach Boys and Mia Farrow were among the other prominent figures who studied with him during this period (Wikipedia). That wave of attention didn't produce a conventional acting career, but it did produce an enormous archive. Post-1991 — after his final public appearance in the Netherlands — his presence on screen shifted entirely to archival. *The Passing of a Saint* (2010) and *David Wants to Fly* (2010) both drew on that footage, crediting him as "Self." *Darshan an Evening with the Maharishi* (2016) extended that archival presence further. He's also represented, somewhat sideways, by Gerry Bednob's comedic portrayal in *Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story* (2007) — a parody that wouldn't exist without the genuine cultural weight the man carried. The founder of the Natural Law Party and the TM-Sidhi program, he built institutions that outlasted him by decades (Wikipedia).