Remembering most popular actress of 30's Leela Chitnis 1912-2003

Born: 9 September 1912, Dharwad
Died: 14 July 2003, Danbury, Connecticut, United States

Ms. Chitnis began her acting career onstage at a time women seldom worked as actors.

She did not care, nor was she abashed by these prejudices when she moved on, in the 1930's, to India's large and lively movie industry in Bombay, now known as Bollywood. She began playing romantic leads and became one of the best-known heroines in the country.

Ms. Chitnis was born on Sept. 9, 1909, in a small town near Bombay. Her father was an English professor who adhered to Brahmo Samaj, a religious movement that rejected caste.

She married a much older man at 15 or 16, and quickly had four children. The couple supported India's struggle for independence from Britain and once risked arrest by harboring Manabendra Nath Roy, a Marxist freedom fighter.

After they divorced, she worked as a schoolteacher and began acting onstage in melodramas typical of the time.

Chitnis' early stage work included comedy Usna Navra (1934) and with her own film group Udyacha Sansar. She started acting to support her four children. She started as an extra and went on to stunt films.

Talkie films were a fledgling art form in the 1930s and Leela gravitated towards cinema with minor roles. Her obvious felicity with histrionics won her notice. Soon, she was working with major names like Master Vinayak in Chhaya (1936), Prabhat's Narayan Kale in Wahan (1937) and Sohrab Modi in Jailor (1938). Willing to experiment with her roles, Leela even donned a man's guise in Gentleman Daku (1937).     

In 1939, Leela became a major star. Ranjit Studios took actor Vishnupant Pagnis (of Prabhat's Sant Tukaram) and made Sant Tulsidas with the actor. Leela played Pagnis' wife, whose love distracts him from his goals.

The same year, Leela  hopped to Bombay Talkies, where Kangan was being made under S Mukherji's supervision. It costarred Ashok Kumar. The friendly competition between the two young stars translated well on screen and this bucolic love story became a thumping hit.

With Kangan's success, Leela replaced Bombay Talkies' ravishing leading lady Devika Rani. Leela made a particularly good partner with Devika Rani's leading man Ashok Kumar for a series of box-office hits such as Azad (Free, 1940), Bandhan (Ties, 1940) and Jhoola ("Swing", 1941) that broadly deal with societal issues.. Ashok Kumar was so impressed by her acting abilities that he admitted to having learnt how to speak with his eyes from her.

In 1941 Chitnis, at the height of her popularity and glamour, created history of sorts by becoming the first Indian film star to endorse the popular Lux soap brand, a concession then only granted to top Hollywood heroines.

By the mid-1940s her career went downhill as the new leading ladies came in. Leela accepted the reality and in 1948 entered the next, and perhaps most renowned, phase of her career in Shaheed ("Martyr"). Cast as the hero's suffering, ailing mother, she played this role to perfection. For 22 years, Chitnis played the mother of the later leading men including Dilip Kumar, often playing an ailing mother or a mother going through hardships and struggling to bring up her offspring. In fact she created the archetype of the Hindi Film mother, which was continued by later actresses. Leela's maternal histrionics were portrayed in a range of films such as Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951), Ganga Jumna (The Confluence, 1961) and, in 1965, the runaway success Guide, based on the award-winning novel of the same name by R.K. Narayan. She was busy through the 1970s, but cut down her appearances thereafter before taking the final curtain call in Dil Tujhko Diya ("I Give My Heart to You") in 1985. She then emigrated to the United States in the late 1980s to join her children. She died in Danbury, Connecticut at a nursing home, at age 94.