ADITI RAO HYDARI E SIDDHARTH: LE NOZZE

Aditi Rao Hydari e Siddharth si sono sposati il 16 settembre 2024 in Telangana. Alla coppia è stata dedicata la copertina di The Vogue India Wedding Book 2024, lo speciale distribuito insieme al numero di settembre-ottobre. In novembre i due attori hanno celebrato un secondo rito nuziale a Jaipur. 

Jaipur

PRIYANKA CHOPRA (PLURI)MODELLA PER GRAZIA

Il numero in edicola domani di Grazia dedica la copertina a Priyanka Chopra, oltre a pubblicare un'intervista concessa dall'attrice. Ma non finisce qui: forse per la prima volta nella storia dell'editoria, la stessa modella appare sulle copertine di tredici edizioni internazionali dello stesso periodico. Nel comunicato ufficiale si legge: 'Grazia (...) lancia un nuovo progetto che vede Priyanka Chopra Jonas protagonista di 13 edizioni internazionali del magazine. Pubblicato in Italia, UK, Messico, USA, America Latina, India, Spagna, Germania, Croazia, Singapore, Malesia, Serbia e Bulgaria, Grazia dedica alla modella, cantante e attrice indiana il servizio di copertina, con uno shooting esclusivo e un’intervista inedita, in cui parla dei suoi nuovi progetti, dell’essere madre e di come ha raggiunto l’apice del successo a 40 anni, dopo due decenni di carriera tra Bollywood e Hollywood'.

Video Grazia UK

Grazia UK

Grazia México

Grazia Latinoamérica

Grazia India

Grazia España

Grazia Deutschland

Grazia Singapore

Grazia Malaysia

Grazia Srbija

Grazia Bulgaria

RAJ & DK: MAXIMUM GUYS

Vi segnalo un lungo articolo di Uday Bhatia dedicato al mitico duo di registi Raj Nidimoru e Krishna DK: Raj & DK: Maximum guys, Mint, 11 marzo 2023. Di seguito un estratto:

'Theirs is a comedy rooted in the everyday, born of miscalculations, coincidences and overreaches, but it’s also practical, a consequence of navigating the obstacle course of daily life in India. (...) Their new Amazon Prime series Farzi (...) [is] a ridiculously entertaining series. (...) Farzi had been rattling about in Raj & DK’s heads since the early 2010s. They had planned it as a film, even pitched it to Shahid Kapoor. Had it happened then, it would have been seen as the directors of 99 taking another shot at a caper film, this time with a star. But it never panned out, so they moved on to other projects. “We write a lot, a lot of ideas drop off,” Nidimoru says. “Farzi never dropped off.” (...) The show pulls together strands from across Raj & DK’s career: the madcap underdog energy of 99; the gritty but lovingly realised Mumbai of Shor In The City; the surreal slapstick of Go Goa Gone (2013); the procedural momentum of their wildly popular Amazon Prime series The Family Man. It also marks 20 years of the duo as film-makers; their first feature, the no-budget Flavors, which screened back in 2003. (...)

When I visited their office in Andheri, Mumbai, the walls were covered with post-its: a season broken down, episode-wise, into key scenes. This was for the Indian offshoot of Citadel, an upcoming Amazon franchise produced by the Russo brothers, which will have a US flagship series followed by spin-offs in India, Italy and Mexico. There’s the prospect of further seasons of The Family Man and Farzi, to say nothing of sequels to the other shows they are debuting. Right now, they are, to flip a phrase from The Family Man, Indian streaming’s maximum guys.

Raj & DK’s career was always building up to this moment. They have never been typical Bollywood directors. They are a bit too self-aware. They don’t do masala. They waited till their fourth Hindi feature before including a lip-synced musical number in the main body of the film. All their films have had music (Sachin-Jigar have been a constant) but you never get the sense (...) that the bottom would fall out if you removed the songs. No wonder they have taken so well to streaming. (...)

Their screenplays are written first in English, dialogue and all. Longtime writing partner Sita Menon then does a Hindi version. Then, because neither Raj, DK nor Menon have a writer’s command over Hindi, they bring in someone to punch up the lines. It has been this way since 99 and they still work like this. “For a long time, we were ribbed - these people who write in English and make Hindi films,” Menon says. But just because they don’t supply all the words themselves doesn’t mean they can’t tell when they have the goods. Since they already have dialogue in English, they don’t need top Bollywood writers, just someone with a quick mind who isn’t opposed to doing translations (this might explain why their work sounds unlike most mainstream Hindi film writing). (...)

On the low-budget Shor In The City, they skipped dialogue writers and took a cheaper, if more chaotic, route. “We were calling cousins and friends and asking them, how would you say this line?” Nidimoru recalls. (...)

Unlike, say, Vishal Bhardwaj or Anurag Kashyap, who draw as much from older Indian films as they do from foreign cinema, Raj & DK’s reference points skew towards Hollywood. (...) The tributes in Go Goa Gone are to foreign zombie films, not the Ramsays. (...)

They started out watching homegrown films, though, DK in Chittoor, Nidimoru in Tirupati - both in Andhra Pradesh. They met in Tirupati’s Sri Venkateswara University as engineering students and continued their film-going, “tripling” on Nidimoru’s bike (an image reproduced in Shor In The City) to go see Telugu and Tamil releases and the occasional Hindi or English film. They also started teaming up for quizzes and charades. “By third year, we were a famous team,” DK says. “We could read each other’s minds.” Both moved to the US after college. They kept in touch, and fell in love with American film.

Over the next few years, without much of a plan, they started fooling around with cinema. They had no formal training, so they would “reverse-engineer” films, breaking down the ones they liked until they understood why they worked. The timing was fortuitous, the tail of the indie boom in the US coinciding with the rise of digital shooting. “You could buy a camera, buy a computer, and shoot a film, edit a film, all on your own,” DK says. “And we were watching all these independent directors making films with no money. That was the boost we needed.” They lived in different states, so they would drive down on the weekends to prep and shoot. After a couple of shorts, they embarked on their first full-length feature. Flavors, an English-language film, was a loosely connected series of vignettes featuring a range of Indian-American characters. (...) In an interview around the time of Flavors’ release, they said they were planning “a new kind of Bollywood movie”.

Full of hope, Raj & DK quit their software jobs in the US and moved to Mumbai, where they wrote a version of what would become their first Hindi film, 99. They tried, unsuccessfully, to get it to Aamir Khan. No doors opened. They went back to the US, where they refined 99 and another script, a gritty urban drama with intersecting stories. It was the latter that yielded their first representative work: a short film called Shor (2008). (...) It was their first work written with Sita Menon. She would go on to co-write all their projects apart from Stree [sceneggiatura di Raj & DK, regia di Amar Kaushik] and The Family Man.

“Flavors was our film school,” DK says. “With Shor, it was like, okay, we know how to make this.” The short became a calling card. Actors Kunal Khemu and Soha Ali Khan loved it, which led to them signing up for 99. (...)

These were some of the Hindi releases in 2009: Dev. D, Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Year, Gulaal, Luck By Chance, Sankat City, Wake Up Sid, Kaminey. Clearly, there were anarchic spirits coursing through the industry then, a lot of them comic. It was the perfect time for Raj & DK to drop their first Hindi film. Almost immediately, they turned their attention to the original vision from which Shor had emerged - what they were now calling Shor In The City. (...)

With their reputation growing, Raj & DK could have chosen to go full Bollywood. Instead, they opted to make a stoner zombie action comedy. (...) This was largely uncharted territory: Zombies didn’t feature in Hindi cinema outside cheesy Ramsay brothers productions. (...) One of the executives they pitched the film to told them later : “We thought you were mental.” Go Goa Gone was mental-funny and hyperviolent. (...) As with 99, it wasn’t so much that the jokes were brilliant (...) but that there were so many of them that it didn’t matter if a few flopped. (...)

Just when everything was going so well, the wheels came off. First there was Happy Ending. (...) Raj, DK and Menon described it variously as an “anti-romcom”, “very meta”, and a comedy about romantic tropes. But the film, set in an impersonal Los Angeles and California, was neither sufficiently satirical nor subversive in the way it was envisioned. A Gentleman, set largely in Miami, followed: their first all-out action film. For once, the actors felt out of sync with Raj & DK’s style. (...) “It was a big studio film,” Menon says. “Many people had their points of view on it. We tried to cater to all of those and the film suffered.” The action sequences held the promise of things to come but mostly it seemed that in upscaling, Raj & DK had misplaced what made them special.

“That control we had was being lost as we got into a bigger circle,” Nidimoru says. “So we decided, on Stree, we will go back to producing ourselves. Let’s make it out of our pockets and release it. It was back to the Shor In The City model.” They were planning to direct it but Amazon came calling. Once The Family Man became a reality, they knew they had to pass the reins on Stree. Amar Kaushik, first assistant director on Go Goa Gone, took over; Raj & DK stayed on as writer-producers. This unequivocally feminist horror-comedy about an avenging female ghost was a sleeper hit in 2018; made on a budget of about ₹24 crore, it grossed over ₹170 crore. Its success kicked off the modern Hindi horror-comedy cycle - though one could argue that started with Go Goa Gone. (...)

I ask if they reverse-engineered for TV too, the way they had done for film. “Yeah, new beast,” DK says. “In a tiny one-room office, every wall was covered with these notes because we had to figure out how to write a frickin’ series,” Nidimoru adds, pointing to post-its on the wall. They are not sure how they arrived at it but they came up with a five-act structure for each episode and a three-act structure for the series. Here was a chance to write, write, write, create a tapestry of characters and plots in a manner that a film just wouldn’t allow. The initial feedback was positive but a little confused. Why was their gritty spy series also a comedy and a family drama? They fretted over suggestions to trim the family stuff, but eventually decided to leave it as it was. (...)

One of the exciting things about The Family Man’s first season was discovering, episode by episode, just how capable Raj & DK were as action directors. They settled on a complicated but rewarding signature: extended sequences shot in one take. The 13-minute hospital breakout in the sixth episode is the most celebrated, but there’s a dynamic single-take shootout in the first episode itself. (...)

For Raj & DK, the show was the start of something new, and not only because it was long-form storytelling. It was the first time they were directing something not written by Menon (Suman Kumar was co-writer). It was also their first brush with politically charged material. Most spy narratives skew towards order and conservatism, and, on balance, The Family Man does too. (...) Yet, there is also doubt and complexity seeded along the way. (...)

Though “pan-India cinema” has been touted as a silver bullet for the theatrical experience, streaming offers a more genuine - and achievable - vision of pan-India film-making. Its viewers are more likely to watch something with subtitles. And they are more likely to have watched films or series in languages they don’t speak. Raj & DK, Telugu-speakers both, have been particularly committed to pan-India casting. (...) The Family Man is full of actors who work across the southern film industries. (...) Samantha Ruth Prabhu as rebel soldier Raji in season 2 wasn’t just a casting coup but a signal that streaming TV was no longer something mainstream actors in the prime of the career wouldn’t consider.

The second season of The Family Man also allowed actors to speak their own language; a lot of the dialogue is in Tamil. The makers even weave the cultural divide into the story. (...)

Da destra: Krishna DK, Suman Kumar, Raj Nidimoru e Sita R. Menon

Other borders beckon. If Citadel is a success, Hollywood could be on the cards. But there’s also a genuine concern of being stretched thin. Whether they can juggle two ongoing shows, three forthcoming ones, their production work, and whatever plans they have for the future remains to be seen. Perhaps they will build a B-team of co-directors like they have done with writers. (...)

In all this, they can count on the partnership of Menon, and each other. Though DK is more technical and Nidimoru more involved with the actors, they are, by all accounts, uncannily in sync. (...) DK jokes that sometimes Nidimoru would walk onto set and say, “What have you done, you have changed the entire shot!” But though they often split production duties, they always shoot together. They seem to seek out, and encourage, actors with a bent for improvisation. (...)

Twenty years on, Raj & DK have built a neat little filmography. Six features directed, three others produced, two series. Comedies all, yet spanning city films, stoner films, capers, family dramas, procedurals, action, horror, romance. All distinctly, visibly theirs, even the clunkers. Watching them in one go, I could see more clearly the motifs and cross-currents: double lives, fraying marriages, cursed phones, frantic runs, fancy parties that regular folks can’t get into. The considerable visual appeal of their work notwithstanding, theirs is a writer’s filmography. “We are really, really happy to be writers,” Nidimoru says. “Writing for us is half the directing”.'

ALIA BHATT: DIECI ANNI DI CARRIERA

Per la talentuosa Alia Bhatt il 2022 segna il decimo anno di carriera, un invidiabile percorso professionale contrassegnato da successi - solo un paio di passi falsi - sia di pubblico che di critica. Diverse testate indiane hanno dedicato ampio spazio alla giovane attrice. Vi segnalo alcuni articoli:

- Is there anything Alia Bhatt can’t do?, Kaveree Bamzai, Open, 15 agosto 2022:

'Alia [Bhatt] always wanted to be a Hindi film heroine. Her father [Mahesh Bhatt] insists her upbringing was not “filmi”. Alia agrees, “I didn’t grow up on a film set. I knew my parents would go away for a while but it was only much later that I realised my father was related to movies and my mother [Soni Razdan] did theatre and TV shows. Growing up, I remember they would play a lot of music, there would be music sittings for movies. But my relationship with acting started with television. I was in my own la la land, watching Karisma Kapoor, Govinda, David Dhawan movies. I would watch Ekta Kapoor’s TV series such as Kasautii Zindagii Kay. I discovered Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema much later. But by the age of four, I had decided to become an actor.” She was seven when she saw Zakhm (1998) and sent her stepsister Pooja Bhatt a note on it. “I remember Pooja telling me she was stunned by her sensitivity at that age,” says Mahesh Bhatt.

As a child, she got many offers to be an actor. “But my mum wanted me to live the life of a child, and not start so young,” she says. When she was nine, her mother took her to [Sanjay Leela] Bhansali to audition for the role of the young girl in Black (2005) that finally went to Ayesha Kapur. “My mum was very keen on me being part of his movies. I had no clue I was going to that meeting. It was only when we were entering Sanjay Sir’s building that she told me. It was where I met Ranbir for the first time. He was taking pictures of me, very eager, being the assistant. I remember Bhansali telling my mother, ‘This girl will be a heroine one day.’ (...) Life does not go according to plan. And sometimes, as women, we forget to define who we are in our own roles. (...) The way I’ve chosen my roles, the timing for my film releases, nothing has been planned. I got married at 29 - I thought I would not get married until much later. Very early on, in my career and personal life, I realised you had to go with what happens naturally, to go with your gut feeling, to go with what feels right as opposed to what you think is right.”

Her greatest gift is her intuitive ability to understand a script, says her mother, actor Soni Razdan. (...) “Student of the Year hadn’t come out but there was something about this child-woman that struck me. I offered her the role of Veera in Highway and asked her to read the script,” he [Imtiaz Ali] says. She did, and loved it, though she was apprehensive about being in every scene of the movie. “My team was not convinced though,” says Ali, and he asked her to the office one day to tell them the story of Highway as she understood it. They were blown away,” he says. 

Gauri Shinde, who directed her in Dear Zindagi (2016), says she has everything one needs to be a great actor, “She is damn real, unafraid to show vulnerability both onscreen and offscreen; highly sensitive and intuitive at such a young age; is sharply focused on her craft; and has a natural charm, energy and honesty that is so appealing that one can’t help but fall in love with her.” She also has the gift of listening, says her Darlings director Jasmeet K. Reen. “When you tell her about the character, you can see her mentally taking notes. Even in readings, she just reads without expression. When the camera starts, she just explodes,” says Reen. (...) Her mother says Alia has a photographic memory that helps her in her performances. (...)

When she finally did get a role in a Bollywood movie, she was 17. It was after a series of auditions and Alia still remembers going to meet [Karan] Johar in his office after she was selected. “I was still in my school uniform,” she says. Johar remembers it slightly differently. (...) “I had met her when she was very tiny because she would come to the film set as Bhatt Sahib has directed two films for my dad. I had not kept in touch. Then I called up her mom and asked whether I could have a meeting. By then, we had auditioned 300 girls for the lead in Student of the Year. Alia walked in and she was really chubby and cute. She had come in her school uniform (...) and we chatted. There was something extraordinary about her. After that, she did the audition and it was amazing,” he says. He then told her he would want her to get into workshops for fitness and acting. Three months later, when they did photo shoots, he knew she was a “bona fide movie star”. He feels she is the finest actor in the country currently, and he means both men and women. Razdan acknowledges his role - he is really like her second father, she says. (...)

Until Student of the Year happened, Razdan says the family was all set to send Alia to the UK or the US for a year’s acting course. She remembers holding Alia’s hand for the first two years of her career, because she was so young. But after the initial phase, Alia took her own calls, says the mother. How different is her stardom from that of her immediate predecessors, the troika of Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma and Katrina Kaif? Unlike them, she is not a particularly gifted dancer. (...) Unlike the three of them who relied on the Khans for their initial stardom, she didn’t have that choice because of her physiognomy. So, either by choice or coincidence, she challenged the Khan patriarchy. Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi featured Shah Rukh Khan, but in an avuncular cameo. Luck and timing are also on her side. She is in the industry at a time when stories are the priority. (...)

Alia’s stardom is also carefully constructed as a conversation with the audience on social media. When her first appearance on Koffee with Karan revealed her lack of general knowledge, she converted it into an opportunity and made “dumb” her calling card. In 2014, the popular YouTube channel, AIB, collaborated with her to create a video called “Genius of the Year”, a spoof of the event. (...) Around the same time, Alia received both critical acclaim and commercial success for her performance in Highway followed by Udta Punjab (directed by Abhishek Chaubey, 2016), and later, Raazi (Meghna Gulzar, 2018). Suddenly, from an entitled star kid she came to be seen as a real actor. (...)

She lets the world (with 68.3 million followers) into her life with Instagram. It is very different in the case of both Deepika and Anushka, whose stardom was more controlled, the lines between personal and private clearly drawn. (...) Add to that a careful balance of commercial cinema and middle-of-the-road movies. (...) And there is a burgeoning career that keeps her priority front and centre, the desire to entertain. For Alia, the last 10 years have gone by very fast. “When I’ve made a mistake, I’ve moved on. I don’t reflect too much, nothing happens for a second time. It’s a different day, a different step. There’s still a lot of work to do, especially now. Maybe, I have the ability to make things happen. I can make a film like Darlings, act in it, co-produce it. I like the idea of showcasing a new director and a new script. That has always been the endeavour. I loved the experience of putting together Darlings, from okaying the script, to working on the story, to the way the film is presented. It makes me so proud to see the human spirit in collaboration. I love that dynamic,” she says. (...) Alia’s heritage is multicultural. On her father’s side, a Muslim grandmother and a Gujarati Hindu grandfather; and on her mother’s side, a Kashmiri Pandit grandfather and a German grandmother. (...) Alia has the thirst to do much more, says her father. She’s looking beyond the horizon. In a battered Bollywood, perhaps her cooperative way of working will usher in a new era'.

- Aila, Alia!, Mayank Shekhar, Mid-Day, 20 agosto 2022. Il testo include il video dell'intervista integrale:

'[Udta Punjab] Bhatt recalls her trainer [Pankaj Tripathi], whom she’d meet every day, mastering body language, Jharkhandi dialect, down to how her character sits on haunches for hours. It’s the only time in her career that Bhatt confesses she went “method” on herself. Meaning, abandoned cell-phone, never stepped out of hotel room, consumed no entertainment, spent time interacting/empathising with local youth, never switched on the TV, and simply marinated in the character, until the shoot ended. Why? Because she wanted to prove she was “a chameleon as an actor.” To whom? To herself, she says. (...) She had in fact read the said script, through Shahid Kapoor, her co-actor in the romantic fantasy, 'Shaandaar' (2015), that they were shooting at the time. She actively went up to [Abhishek] Chaubey, asking him to consider her for the battered female lead. The initial look-test didn’t wholly convince him either. She even learnt to play hockey for a month, which is only part of the character’s back-story, not even in the film. The effort totally matches the outcome. Although she says, “There is a part [of me] that says I won’t do it again; of course, never say never. I only played that part for 20 days, which was great. I don’t know how I would have survived it for, say, 60 days.” (...)

With Gangubai, Bhatt reveals about Bhansali being the performative inspiration: “I took so much of Sir’s personality and put that into Gangubai’s character - the way he speaks, thinks, has a certain attitude. (...) Because it is in his head. Film is the director’s medium. And then it’s the written word. The actor has to collect all those things and place it in front of the camera.” (...)

“I am very open to people’s opinions. That is the only way a person learns. But there is [this] humbling part [in my personality] that also comes with my upbringing, and the people around me. I am not the first member of my own fan club. I do not believe the sun shines out of my backside. I genuinely believe I am here to do a job, and must continue to do it well, which is a by-product of a lot of people doing their job well. It is not just me. I value that. (...) I recently realised that I have literally not been a ‘present’ friend for 10 years. And they let me be ‘unpresent’, because they knew I was chasing something. And you have to make sacrifices to try and get what you want. I have the same [set of] nine friends I went to (...) school with. At the end of the day, I feel most comfortable with them. There is a certain version of myself that I have to be in a public space, which I don’t, in their company. What matters to them is me, being me. That’s very grounding. The reason I have not lost them, is because of them. Because they have been so understanding, supportive.” (...)

Here’s Bhatt, the actor, with a house, car, checked, before 21; Bollywood debut before 20; started a film company, and then married, and is even expecting a child, before she turns 30! Is she following some timeline - yes/no/maybe?

Bhatt says, “Contrary to the character in Darlings, I don’t have a list. I have never had a plan. In fact, I used to think I will get married very late. I was one of those girls, who didn’t really talk about marriage much. But it is totally different, when you fall deeply in love, and you also feel like, okay, no, you want to get into that next point of your life. That happened very naturally with Ranbir [Kapoor]. I don’t know why. It just happened. And I am not feeling like my work will stop, pause, or change. I will continue to work till the very end. But that [raising a family] section of your life is something that you have to give your time and energy to. It is not going to happen by itself.” As for manifesting life events, here’s something that can’t be denied about her relationship with her now-husband, Ranbir Kapoor. Over the past decade, pick up any interview, especially the rapid-fire round type stuff that’s common on YouTube chats. Every time she’s been asked about a crush, someone she’d like to date on-screen, etc - inevitably, her answer has been Ranbir Kapoor. Which is mildly strange, since both of them had been dating other people, all through. It’s almost like she set her eyes on this guy, and simply announced to the world that that’s the one she’s gonna end up with. Bhatt laughs, “You know, it is really weird. I was saying it as a regular ‘cute girl’. I was not actually chasing Ranbir on the side, or plotting to get Ranbir; none of that was happening. The fact that I was saying it obviously means I was not thinking about it. Sometimes when you think about it, you never say it. It is beautiful how it naturally worked out, when we started working together on Brahmāstra. For the longest time, we were socially meeting each other. But we had our own lives. There was no interaction, nothing. There was not even a friendship. I could not even call Ranbir a friend. But it naturally happened on that one flight to Tel Aviv, when we both were not seeing anybody. Both of us were single. Both of us were like, ‘Oh my God, what were we doing all these years?’ ‘Why aren’t we together?’ It was a question he kinda asked me. I was like, ‘I don’t know!’ So that’s what I was talking about. You cannot plan something like this”.'

MADHURI DIXIT: THE RETURN OF THE QUEEN

Il 25 febbraio 2022 Netflix ha distribuito The Fame Game, serie in otto episodi diretta da Bejoy Nambiar e Karishma Kohli, prodotta da Karan Johar. Trailer. The Fame Game segna il debutto di Madhuri Dixit nel mondo delle serie. La diva interpreta il ruolo principale, una famosa attrice hindi di nome Anamika Anand. The Fame Game sta registrando in India un lusinghiero successo. Il settimanale Open dedica a Madhuri la copertina del numero del 7 marzo 2022, e pubblica un lungo articolo a firma Kaveree Bamzai, Madhuri Dixit: The Return of the Queen. Riporto di seguito un estratto:

'Madhuri, who will turn 55 this year, began in (...) 1984. (...) Just for context, the three Khans, her contemporaries, made it big on the small and big screens four years later. She has been through the worst phase of the film industry, when women were infantilised, given bows and bands in their hair, made to wear shimmering pink lipstick and glittering blue eye­shadow, and given costumes fit for plastic dolls. She has survived rumours of affairs (with co-star Sanjay Dutt), a terrible case of acne, a kissing scene in Dayavan (1988) which she regrets to this day, and a media that wrote her off as often as it declared her the new No. 1. Yet she survived and thrived, setting the template for the Hindi film heroine: homegrown beauty, dancing skills and a girl-next-door charm which made the audience relate to her. As film scholar Aysha Viswamohan says, Madhuri owned the 1990s. (...) “She could effortlessly straddle the boundaries between being a glam doll and a simple middle-class girl. She was the last of the female stars who ruled the single-screen theatres,” she says. (...) 

The emblematic actress and the item girl. There are many Madhuris. (...) Ageless. Timeless. Peerless. In a career spanning 38 years, is it any wonder we have so many Madhuri Dixits to reclaim and revisit? And then there is the Madhuri of the dance contests, the online dance platform she has launched, and the Instagram reels, dancing like no one is watching, smiling to fans, cooking with her husband, singing with her older boy, and now even wanting to learn tennis. “I don’t dwell on the past,” she says, her 12 years in the US echoing in a faint twang. “It’s done, let’s move on. I want to do something more, something better all the time. There’s always something new to learn,” she says, sitting in a white pant­suit, one leg propped up on the chair, the other swinging slightly, her high heels abandoned. She is the picture of grace, comfort, ease.

It wasn’t always so. She started out as a nervous newbie with two pigtails and thin arms (...) at the age of 17, and would have remained a footnote from a forgotten film had three men not decided to reinvent her career. They released a six-page ad in the film weekly Screen, listing the names of eight directors who were keen to work with the young actress. Despite five flop films before this, the announcement gave Madhuri the sheen of a newcomer. The men: producer Boney Kapoor; his brother, actor Anil Kapoor’s secretary, Rakesh Nath; and director Subhash Ghai, then at the height of his fame, who (...) shot a showreel for Madhuri and sent it to the directors.

Ek Do Teen

Each of the three men would play a significant role in the legend that Madhuri became. But it was a fourth person, a woman, who would give form to the allure these men saw in the slim, young aspiring microbiologist. And predictably for Madhuri, it was a dance that made her a star. ‘Ek Do Teen’, a song written by Javed Akhtar, is set almost at the beginning of N. Chandra’s gritty Tezaab. Composed in 20 minutes by Saroj Khan, it took Madhuri 16 days of laborious rehearsal and seven days of shooting, including a continuous 24-hour shoot, to produce. For her, “It was like a classroom.” She learnt how to dance for the camera with this song.

Energetic, vigorous, expressive, the song, shot in Mehboob Studios, transformed her into a star. The sweet smile combined with the heaving chest, the exaggerated swaying of the hips and the pelvic thrusts created a new kind of heroine who could subsume the function of the vamp. The big hair, the glittery costume, the elaborate stage were usually elements of the vamp’s repertoire. But Madhuri brought to it a charming innocence which was all Saroj’s doing. Writing in February 1989, film critic Madhu Jain called the film the dark horse of 1988 and ascribed much of its success to the song which is “driving people crazy. Ek do teen, they hum from the shower to the office, from the office to the bedroom and everywhere else in between.”

The dance marked a turning point in the history of Hindi film dance for several reasons, writes gender and sexuality scholar Paromita Vohra. For the first time, it presented a clear heroine figure in a dance that is chiefly sexy, and presented sexiness with a robust, bodily series of steps. From this film on, a Madhuri Dixit film meant there had to be a Madhuri Dixit dance item in the film. The songs were full of double meanings and suggestions, as well as winks and teasing steps (...) - all of these featured much heaving of breasts, sticking out of bottoms and sinuous hip movements. Saroj also developed the signature step, which was repeated along with the refrain of the song, and through which cinema culture became physical culture, allowing those watching to imitate the dancing bodies, says Vohra.

Saroj was as focused on Madhuri’s face as her body. Though she had never been classically trained, Saroj had understood the fundamentals of Kathak and Bharatnatyam over her years as a group dancer and assistant choreographer. She poured all her learning into ‘Ek Do Teen’ and into Madhuri. She introduced sensuality, distinct from vulgarity, in the traditional Bollywood dance, skirting the line between pure classicism and cinematic extravagance. Saroj didn’t just dance with her body, she danced with her soul. And she made Madhuri a star. Madhuri recalls the time: “Every producer wanted me to do a dance number in his or her film... We were shooting a song for Tridev. There were three actresses. Sonam was a bigger star and so, she was made to stand in the centre. But as soon as ‘Ek Do Teen’ became a hit, the producer changed our positions. I was in the centre.”

Her frequent co-star from that era, Anil Kapoor, with whom she shared the once powerful Rakesh Nath, says he doesn’t want to take any credit for her career. “She has made it on her own, with the support of her wonderful, dignified and simple parents; she’s gifted and a born actress who blossomed into a big star but she will always be a daughter, wife, mother, and a dear friend. A fabulous dancer with a million-dollar smile.” Their friendship has endured since 1985, even when she married cardiac surgeon Dr. Shriram Nene in 1999, went to Gainesville, Florida, and then Denver, Colorado, and lived in the US for 12 years before moving back. It has weathered storms, including rumours of discomfort caused by Madhuri’s rivalry with the other great female star of the era, Sridevi, who eventually and controversially married Boney Kapoor in 1996. Madhuri shared the throne with Sridevi for a while and then came the blockbuster Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! that made her the nation’s sweetheart. By 1994, she had toppled Sridevi from her No. 1 position and was on the cover of practically every magazine with her radiant smile.

It is difficult to imagine how many hearts Madhuri broke when she married cardiac surgeon Dr. Nene, whom she was introduced to by her brother in the US. Deepika Padukone once laughingly recounted in an interview how her father, badminton star Prakash, locked himself in the bathroom to mourn her marriage. Madhuri’s reversal of fortune coincided with the arrival of women who had won global beauty events. By the late 1990s the definition of ‘beauty’ had changed forever and had paved the way for a different kind of heroine who fit the requirements of a more international kind of screen presence, points out Viswamohan.

Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai

Madhuri’s ethnicity had a lot to do with her rise, says veteran film critic Maithili Rao. Maharashtra had waited a long time for a Marathi mulgi (girl) to rule the industry as its prime diva, says Rao. “After Nutan, an accomplished actor with gravitas, there was a palpable underlying angst that none of their own rose to be the reigning queen in the city of dreams,” says Rao. Madhuri is perhaps the best dancer we have had, with her natural grace, infectious joie de vivre and intuitive ability to make the erotic acceptable. ‘Choli Ke Peeche’ in Khal Nayak is the most famous (infamous?) example of cinema as the most powerful tool to empower the male gaze. Sanjay Dutt’s eye­patch emphasised visual pleasure that catered to male fantasy. Its risqué lyrics and celebration of rustic raunch outraged many puritans but Madhuri’s shapely shoulders shrugged off any charge of obscenity, notes Rao.

Despite ‘Ek Do Teen’ and ‘Choli Ke Peeche’ being synonymous with her rise to fame, the Madhuri paradox cast her in the image of the good beti-bahu [figlia-nuora] imbued with family values. “Nisha of Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! is everyone’s favourite daughter, who combined docility with a sparkle of mischief.” (...) says Rao.

Similarly, she says Saraswati of Beta, in time, became the template of the bahu who righted wrongs done to her simpleton husband. (...) This story of a determined, intelligent bahu restoring the right patriarchal order has been a favourite trope of popular literature and films. Saraswati is not the coy bride of earlier films. Beta rechristened Madhuri as the dhak dhak girl where she seduces the innocent husband with her heaving breasts and alluring smile, creating her own path to justice. Madhuri is the feminine strong woman who uses her Mohini [personaggio in Tezaab] avatar with discretion.

And yet the 1990s’ women often dressed like girls, perhaps to match the men, who were boys. Remember Madhuri in Dil, with her long dresses, which can only be described as Barbie frocks, and the big hair? Madhuri grew up, but the Khan boys didn’t, moving on to ever younger heroines in an effort to remain evergreen. It was a time when women were girls on the set too, with the ever present Mummy. Madhuri, too, was accompanied everywhere by her mother, even to parties where the men and women were segregated. One actress of the era remembers attending parties where the men drank in one room while the women sat, usually with their mummies, talking desultorily in another room.

Unlike Anamika Anand, Madhuri was never forced into the film industry. She chose to make it hers because she loved the work. “Whatever I did was because I wanted to,” she says. She is the gold standard for heroines, the perfect balance of wholesome goodness and secret sensuality, of little-girl innocence and womanly wiles, of perfect professionalism and easy warmth. (...) But she isn’t all sweetness and light. She has no time for excessive flattery. Incompetence irritates her too. “If everyone in this world did what they were supposed to do, wouldn’t it be a wonderful place?” she asks. Anger is not a totally unfamiliar emotion to her, but it takes some doing she says to get her really upset: “I’m a calm and patient person by nature.”

Madhuri loves the freshness of the streaming series. As she says: “It’s not just that Anamika is based in the film industry but it’s her relationship with her family. Her mother, her husband. That was fascinating to me because I’ve grown up in a very different, sheltered environment. My mom has always stood by me. Anamika Anand is completely the opposite. She did things because her mother was so domineering and now that she has everything, she doesn’t want to lose it. She’s clinging to it.”

Madhuri’s father ran a workshop making switchboard control panels and handled her finances, while her mother, a trained classical vocalist, was always there to support her, to pep her up when she was down: “I always had her. But there was no one else to guide us. I was just fortunate to get good directors and good roles,” she says. Madhuri the actor has been through some rough times. There were no vanity vans to retreat to, there were rarely air conditioners, the shifts were long, and sometimes there were two in a day, and there was no entourage to protect the star. “I had a hair­dresser, a make-up artist, and my mom and sometimes my manager would drop in to see (...). That’s it. Now we have a social media team and so many teams that follow us wherever we go because that is the world we live in right now. I don’t see anything wrong in it because everything matters now. What you’re doing on social media, what you’re doing on the set, how you look, what you’re wearing. Now you need a whole village to create a star.”

What’s new is also the number of women on the set. “When I began the only women on set were me, my mum, my female co-stars and the hairdressers. That’s it (remember even make-up artists were a male preserve until 2014 when Charu Khurana took the matter to the Supreme Court). But today, when I walk on to a set, there are female assistant directors, directors, cinematographers, there’s a woman in every department. Writers, photographers, it’s so heartening to see them making a mark,” she says.

Madhuri Dixit in The Fame Game

Madhuri seems remarkably sanguine about ageing. “It’s great to have fans in all age groups,” she says, “whether it’s mothers or kids, grandparents or grandchildren.” She’s a mom first and last. “Fame is great but your kids are your legacy finally. You’ll always be protective of them. You’ll always love them and you’ll always stand up for them and give your life for them. That’s what Anamika is as well, a tigress who wants to protect her children at all costs but who also loves them for who they are, unlike her mother (...) who wanted her to be a particular way.”

The time away from India gave her perspective. “I chose to do that. I met Ram and decided this is the man I want to marry and I did. It was something I had dreamt for myself, having a house, a husband, kids. It was a big part of my dream for myself,” she says. First they lived in Gainesville for two years, and then in Denver for 10. “Coming back was also an eventuality. My parents were getting old, I thought it’d be great to have the boys (Arin, 19, and Ryan, 17) grow up in India. Culturally, it was much richer for them,” she says. “They learnt the tabla, the piano; it was great to give them the art and culture that we have. Coming back was a great journey; I started working again. It was not planned, just organic.” She talks about her supportive husband, her mother-in-law especially who is a career woman herself (she’s a real estate agent). “My mom is a classical vocalist so I always had the art in me. I had this support system. Whenever I think of other women, I do hope they have this kind of family behind them,” she adds.

Madhuri doesn’t regret returning to India. (...) Her husband is happy too. (...) Their online academy, Dance With Madhuri, which he manages now, has taken off, and both are passionate about it. “Accessibility to good gurus is limited. There is a time and cost constraint. But at Dance With Madhuri, you can come and learn dance at your convenience from the privacy of your home. It is in 199 countries, we have an audience everywhere. We have a community of artists who can converse with each other. I wish Anamika had done that,” she says.

When she’s not Anamika, she is with her boys, talking to them, sharing something with them, or she is with her husband (...) “There’s always something new to learn.” And that is the secret to her enduring appeal. At the heart of the goddess is a diligent, dutiful and dedicated student'.