A faded star simmers away
SUBHASH K JHA
IANS TUESDAY, JULY 15, 2003 05:25:13 PM ]
MUMBAI: Like many faded stars, Leela Chitnis died an unhappy woman.
In her final years – she died in the US on Sunday – her loved ones abandoned her. But one never heard this archetypal screen mother complain, not even in her autobiography that was published 22 years ago.
Born in 1912 in Karnataka, Chitnis was closely associated with Marathi stage before she joined films as a junior artiste. Her first role as a leading lady was in Master Vinayak’s Hindi/Marathi melodrama Chhaya in 1936 in which she played the title role.
In Gentleman Daku, she played a thief dressed as a man. But it was her series of melodramas for Bombay Talkies, with Ashok Kumar in the lead, which catapulted Chitnis to fame.
In Kangan (1939), the first of the super-hit films with Ashok Kumar, Chitnis was cast as the stereotypical village belle who pines for her citified beloved amidst great villainous hurdles.
Her subsequent films with Ashok Kumar, Bandhan (1940) and Jhoola (1941), were also major successes.
After a brief innings at the top, Chitnis switched to playing the role of mother in 1948 with the patriotic film Shaheed in which she was cast as Dilip Kumar’s mother.
She later played the same actor’s mother in the super-successful Ganga Jamuna, and also Dev Anand’s mother in two evergreen films, Hum Dono and Guide. She also directed a film, Aaj Ki Baat, in 1955.
Chitnis’ most well known maternal role was in Awaara in 1951 in which she was cast by Raj Kapoor as his mother who’s deserted by her husband for suspected infidelity.
If Chitnis’ Radha in Kangan epitomised rustic beauty in mainstream Hindi cinema, her role of a mother in Awaara embodied the long-suffering, eternally unhappy image of the screen mother later adopted by other actresses like Sulochana and Nirupa Roy.
Her most successful and productive innings was in the 1960s. In the 1970s her career trickled into sporadic appearances. Her last appearance was in the Kamal Haasan-starrer Dil Tujhko Diya in 1985.
Thereafter she migrated abroad to be with her children only to be forced into a life of desperate exile in the US where she died on Sunday.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?msid=76971
but ofcourse if a parent or both parents have given nothing to the children or other relatives but sheer pain and humiliation then i suppose one can’t blame em’