Sridevi

Sridevi: The Shyest Woman in Indian Cinema

The critic Rajeev Masand described the paradox better than anyone: "I have never known anyone who was so painfully shy, so quiet off-screen, who just transformed into a force of nature when the cameras came on. She was an interviewer's nightmare, but the movie-buff's dream." For five decades, across five languages and roughly three hundred films, the country's most watched woman was also one of its most reticent. She started at four and had barely stopped when she died at fifty-four.

A Childhood Spent on Set

She was born Shree Amma Yanger Ayyapan on 13 August 1963 in Meenampatti village near Sivakasi, Tamil Nadu, daughter of Ayyapan, a lawyer from Sivakasi, and Rajeswari, from Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. Telugu was her mother tongue; she grew up fluent in Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam and Kannada, a linguistic range that would let her work simultaneously in five film industries.

She made her debut at four, in the Tamil film Kandhan Karunai (1967). Her first real breakthrough came as a child artist in Thunaivan (1969), playing the young Muruga; she entered Telugu cinema in 1970 with Maa Nanna Nirdoshi, won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Child Artist in 1971 for the Malayalam film Poompatta, and appeared in her first Hindi film, Rani Mera Naam, in 1972. There was no formal schooling and almost no contact with other children. She developed a lasting dislike of crowds and noise, and from 1972 to 1994 her mother Rajeswari or her sister Srilatha accompanied her to every set.

The Southern Star

Her first adult lead came in 1976 in K. Balachander's Moondru Mudichu. Within two years — 16 Vayathinile, Sigappu Rojakkal, Padaharella Vayasu — she was the leading actress in Tamil cinema. She took the Filmfare Award for Best Actress in Tamil for Meendum Kokila in 1981 and the Tamil Nadu State Film Award in 1982 for Moondram Pirai, playing a woman with amnesia. She appeared in twenty-seven films with Kamal Haasan across several languages, and in roughly ninety-five Telugu films, winning both the Filmfare and Nandi awards for Ram Gopal Varma's Kshana Kshanam in 1991.

Bombay Falls

Her Hindi debut, Solva Sawan, came in 1979, but 1983 was the year that changed the industry. Himmatwala, opposite Jeetendra, was the highest-grossing Hindi film of the year; Sadma, released the same year, brought critical acclaim and her first Filmfare Best Actress nomination. Tohfa topped the box office again in 1984, and Filmfare pronounced her "Unquestionably #1." She made sixteen films with Jeetendra, twelve of them hits.

Then came the run that made her singular. Nagina (1986), a snake fantasy, finished second at the year's box office and established her as the biggest female star of the decade, spoken of alongside Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra. Mr. India (1987) earned her a fee of ₹1.1 million, making her the highest-paid actress in India. Yash Chopra's Chandni (1989) was a blockbuster that paid her ₹1.5 million; ChaalBaaz the same year gave her a double role later ranked fourth in Filmfare's list of eighty iconic performances in Hindi cinema. Lamhe (1991), in which she played both mother and daughter, won her a second Filmfare Best Actress award and became a cult film despite modest returns. Khuda Gawah (1992), opposite Bachchan, brought ₹2.5 million and the Order of Afghanistan. She topped Box Office India's list of leading actresses five years running from 1987 to 1991 and was the highest-earning woman in Indian entertainment.

She turned down a small part Steven Spielberg offered her during Jurassic Park, judging the role beneath her standing.

The Long Silence

She married the producer Boney Kapoor in 1996, having refused to speak to him for six months when he first proposed because of his existing marriage. Her father had died of a heart attack in 1990 while she was shooting Lamhe. Her mother underwent brain tumour surgery in 1995 at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, where the surgeon operated on the wrong side, destroying tissue governing vision and recent memory; she died the following year. The case was widely reported in the American press, won in court, and influenced President Bill Clinton's proposals on hospital error disclosure. After Judaai in 1997 and the birth of her daughter Janhvi, Sridevi left the screen. Khushi followed in 2000. She surfaced on television in the sitcom Malini Iyer in 2004–05, took up painting, and in March 2010 auctioned her canvases for charity.

The Return

English Vinglish (2012) ended a fifteen-year absence. She played a housewife enrolling in an English course after her family mocks her; Rajeev Masand called it "a performance that is nothing short of perfect," and The Times of India called the film "easily one of the best films of 2012." She became the only Bollywood actress to return successfully as a leading lady after marriage and a long absence. Mom (2017), her three hundredth film, cast her as a mother avenging her daughter's rape; she said she empathised so completely with the character's rage that she found it hard "to be in a normal state during the filming," and The Times of India wrote that she "demonstrates why she is the high-priestess of Indian cinema." It won her the National Film Award for Best Actress, presented after her death. A cameo in Zero was her last appearance.

Why Sridevi Is Called a Genius

The faculty was performance intelligence: an unusually exact control over what the camera receives, combined with almost no ordinary social equipment to fall back on. Shah Rukh Khan located it precisely — "she has this whole process of being able to see herself while she is performing." That is a rare double consciousness, the actor simultaneously inhabiting and monitoring a performance from outside, and it is what let her carry double roles in ChaalBaaz and Lamhe where the two characters had to be legibly different people. Sukanya Verma named the other half: "Sridevi's biggest plus point is her ability to be completely uninhibited in front of the camera." She could play broad comedy, mythic fantasy, slapstick, tragedy and, at forty-nine, a quiet suburban housewife, in five languages, without a drama school or a school of any kind.

The honest limits are these. This is interpretive and physical craft — timing, dance, expression, mimicry — not authorship; she did not write, direct or produce, and much of her 1980s output was formula cinema of no great distinction, carried by her. Some of the acclaim is retrospective canonisation of a beloved figure who died suddenly and young. But the specific claim usually made is testable and holds: a CNN-IBN poll in 2013 voted her India's greatest actress of the past hundred years, and Priyanka Chopra wrote in Time that "she could be childlike, grown-up, funny, serious, beguiling, sexy — she was the ultimate actor." She is routinely called Indian cinema's first female superstar because she was the first woman who did not need a male lead to open a film.

Legacy

She received the Padma Shri in 2013. She died on 24 February 2018 in a hotel bathtub in Dubai, aged fifty-four; Dubai forensics ruled it accidental drowning. Her funeral in Mumbai on 28 February drew more than seven thousand mourners and was conducted with state honours and a gun salute — a distinction normally reserved for prime ministers. Her ashes were immersed off Rameswaram. She appeared in the Academy Awards In Memoriam that year, and in 2019 took a posthumous Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award. Her daughters Janhvi and Khushi both act. Boney Kapoor's tribute stands as the plainest summary: "To the world, she was their Chandni, the actor par excellence, their Sridevi, but to me, she was my love, my friend, mother to our girls, my partner."