Mumbai: Bollywood actress Sridevi, star of films like Mr India, Chaalbaaz, Chandni, and Lamhe, widely considered one of Indian cinema’s finest leading ladies, passed away after suffering a massive cardiac arrest in Dubai on Saturday.
The actress, who was 54, was in Dubai this week with her husband Boney Kapoor and younger daughter Khushi to attend the wedding of Boney’s nephew Mohit Marwah.
Sridevi, who had been working in the movies for nearly five decades, received six Filmfare Awards over the years, and in 2013 was conferred with the Padma Shri by the Government of India.
The actress, who was a favorite with both movie-goers and critics, leaves behind a formidable body of work that includes popular commercial hits and strong performance-driven pictures. She has not only been hailed for her versatility, but is also unanimously considered the best female comic star to grace the Indian screen.
Sridevi first faced the camera at the age of four in the 1969 Tamil film Thunaivan, and continued to work in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films as a child artiste before she landed her first lead role in 1976 in the Tamil film Moondru Mudichu.
Just three years later, in 1979, she starred in her first Hindi film, Solva Saavan, even while continuing to make her name in the South. In 1983, she starred in Himmatwala. That film was a runaway success, and a milestone in her career, and marked the beginning of a winning partnership with Jeetendra. In 1983, Sadma, a remake of her own Tamil film, became a turning point for Sridevi when it revealed her as-yet-unseen phenomenal acting skills.
By the time the super-hit snake film Nagina released in 1986, Sridevi was a star of reckoning in the Bombay film industry. The following year she cemented her position as the Number One female actress in Bollywood with the runaway success of Mr India. That film remains, to date, one of the most enduring films of our time, and who can forget her Charlie Chaplin impression in one of the film’s best comic sequences?
In Chaalbaaz and Chandni, she found commercial films that gave her scope to flex her acting chops. In Lamhe, despite the film’s failure, she made a big impression playing both mother and daughter in a bold, complex love story.
By now, she was the top choice of leading filmmakers and starred in some of the biggest films of the day, including Khuda Gawah opposite Amitabh Bachchan, and Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja. In 1997, she starred in Judaai with Anil Kapoor, and subsequently retired from acting after announcing that she was pregnant with her first child from her marriage to already married film producer Boney Kapoor.
In 2004, she made her television debut in the short-lived sitcom Malini Iyer, but did not return to the movies until 2013 when she starred as an under-confident housewife who changes her life when she takes English lessons on a trip to America in the winning comedy English Vinglish. It had been 15 years since she’d been on a film set but she returned with a tour de force performance that earned her a whole new generation of fans.
In 2017, she chewed up the scenery again, this time playing a mother determined to avenge the rape of her teenage daughter in the vigilante thriller Mom, which was billed as her 300th film release.
Sridevi repeatedly reassured her fans that she would continue to act, but selectively. Of late she was grooming her older daughter Jhanvi, who is currently shooting her first film Dhadak, a Hindi remake of the Marathi superhit Sairaat.
Reinventing herself from “Miss Thunder Thighs” in her early acting years into one of the most stylish divas; learning to speak Hindi fluently from not knowing a word of the language; fighting the industry’s stigma against married actresses; Sridevi overcame many challenges to emerge one of the most successful leading ladies of India, and an artiste whose enduring performances inspire a whole generation of film-buffs and serve as a masterclass for younger actors.
Her brilliance, her versatility and her range can be determined also from the fact that it’s impossible to pick just ONE definitive Sridevi performance. She leaves us with extraordinary body of work that will be celebrated for a long time to come.
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