I am love theatre/drama and at the same time I enjoy watching movies as well.
Some of the popular artists of Indian Cinema are from Theatres. I may not be able to tell names of all great artists but here are some:
Paresh Rawal
naseeruddin shah
Om puri
nawazuddin siddiqui
rajat kapoor
Vinay pathak
Sharman Joshi
Many more actors and actresses are from Theatres. Even directors are from Theatres back ground.
One must understand the difference between this two:
To make a movie you need money, man power, a strong script, good actors, good director and a strong marketing team. It takes too much of risk and time to produce one good movie. Once the movie is out and released, than it is up to viewers to decide its fate. Some time even big projects fail. This has a huge impact on many people even on the career of director and actors. Many production house suffer from this losses. Making a movie or drama is not an easy thing. To get in to a character for an actor it takes skill. Not every person can act.
Now, coming to drama, first you need a good script, good actors, a director and finance. Getting a finance for them is a big challenge as in India golden days for theatre business is over now. People watch more movies or spend 500 to 1000 per ticket on a movie rather than watching drama. The real talent of an actor is tested here. He has to memorize all his dialogues and has to act very quickly as viewers are sitting right in front of him/her. I have seen one solo act by vinay pathak where in he continuously acted for almost 90 minutes. The name of the play was "Nothing like lear". This play was directed by Rajat kapoor. In this play Vinay pathak speaks continuously for 90 mins. Its amazing watching him do that. I have seen many more plays as I love to watch them.
I have seen more than 3000 movies till date(english+ Hindi - English mostly) and I admire some of the performances from actors like jack nicholsan, morgan freeman, Tom hanks, Will smith, Farhan akhtar, amitabh bachhan, nawazuddin siddiqui and many more. But, I would prefer watching theatre over movies as you must appreciate the hard work done by actors in drama.