Looking back at the real and the reel life of the late Sridevi, Subhash K Jha celebrates her pitch-perfect acting in the many excellent performance on film, saying there will never be another like her.
On August 13, Sridevi would have turned 62.
Sridevi could have married anyone. Like her Southern predecessor, Hema Malini, she chose a married man with two children.
Sridevi never looked back. “It was Boneyji and no one else for me. I felt protected and loved in his company. He took care of me before marriage. I was sure he would take care of me after marriage,” she once let me into her personal thoughts.
Soon after her marriage and the birth of her firstborn, Janhvi, Sridevi’s Judaai hit the screen. In the first week, it was summarily rejected as trash, which , admittedly, it was. But here is the thing: Sridevi’s career’s best performance is in this junk film. Her portrayal of a greedy, self-serving wife and insensitive mother was so flamboyantly filmy it was as though Sridevi was satirizing and mocking every portrayal of the loud, ill-mannered, belligerent housewife, from Shashikala in Devar to Achala Sachdev in Kora Kagaz.
Judaai has over the years become Sridevi’s most hated film with her best-loved performance. A day after Janhvi was born, I was sitting with the gentle, soft-spoken Yash Chopra in his beautifully appointed bungalow when his phone rang. It was Sridevi. My heart skipped a beat when I realized who it was.
Mr Chopra finished his conversation and told me, “I told Sri after Judaai she can’t retire. No one can do what she can.” He wanted her for Veer-Zaara.
I have to agree with such a true connoisseur of beauty who reinvented Sridevi’s career in Chandni. With this film, Sridevi became a Yash Chopra heroine. Thinned down to a chiselled charmer and sharpening her subtle emotive skills, Sridevi delivered a knockout performance, which straightaway propelled her to the top position. The film was an extended showreel of her talent as she danced, sang, giggled, and wept for the love of a tragically wheelchair-bound Rishi Kapoor.
Seldom has any Yash Chopra heroine made such sumptuous use of the camera space. Chandni is overrated, though Sridevi is absolutely enchanting in it; the scene-stealer was Rishi Kapoor. She was far superior in Yash Chopra’s Lamhe where she made Anil Kapoor look like a junior artiste. Sridevi, as we all know, is addictive. After Chandni, Yash Chopra brought her back to the screen in this bold love story of a girl who dares to love a man old enough to be her father. Sridevi played both the mother and the daughter with such distinctive flair that we wondered, could the same actress do so many different spectrums of emotion in the same film?
She was drop-dead gorgeous in Mr India. But she was just as good in the follow-up Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja, which no one saw her in. She was even better in Army where she played a gender-reversed Amjad Khan’s role in Sholay of a woman, who hires mercenaries to avenge the villain Danny Denzongpa. As it often happened, Sri was far superior to the material offered to her. It is the only film that brought Sridevi face-to-face with Shah Rukh Khan. In this film, there is a sequence where Shah Rukh, playing an army jawaan, is brought home dead. All through the film, Shah Rukh plays ‘I-am-dead’ pranks on Sridevi, so she presumes this is also one of those sick jokes. The way she goes from giggling dismissal to shock and finally a breakdown in that sequence, is a textbook of pitch-perfect acting.
Sure, she is incredibly engaging in Chaalbaaz, Sadma, and English Vinglish. But have you seen her in K Vishawanth’s Jaag Utha Insaan? Though it was Himmatwala that launched her into stardom in Bollywood (a role she got after Rekha turned it down), it was this unsuccessful nugget of a film produced by Rakesh Roshan and directed by the inimitable K. Vishwanath, where Sridevi shone as a temple dancer wooed by a Brahmin boy (Rakesh Roshan) and a socio-economically challenged underdog (Mithun Chakraborty). Sridevi danced and emoted as though there was no tomorrow. And as long as she did, we didn’t care if there wasn’t a tomorrow.
Flashback to the first time I spoke to the Diva. It was the days of the landline, and I called Boney Kapoor in his hotel room. That unmistakable tinny voice answered the phone.
“Is that who I think it is?” I asked in a trembling voice.
She laughed gently. “Yes, this is Sridevi. Boneyji is not here at the moment. Can I take a message?”
We spoke many times thereafter, and I reminded her of our first conversation. She said she remembered it. But I think she was only humouring me. Sridevi could never really hurt anyone.So why did she die such a cruel premature death?
