Career
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.
She was publicized in the Times of India as the first graduate society-lady from Maharashtra. By then she had already made her first major mark as an actress on the silver screen. Chitnis worked at Prabhat Pictures, Pune and Ranjit Movietone before going on to be the leading lady in Bombay Talkies which saw her overtake and outshine Devika Rani. Her association with Bombay Talkies shot her to stardom and she made a particularly good partner with Devika Rani's leading man Ashok Kumar. Ashok Kumar was so impressed by her acting abilities that he admitted to having learnt how to speak with his eyes from her. By the mid 1940s her career went downhill as the new leading ladies came in. 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. She continued doing films and then emigrated to the United States in the late 1980s to join her children. In 1941, she was the first Indian actress to endorse Lux (soap). She died in Danbury, Connecticut at a nursing home, at age 93.
Read more about this topic: Leela Chitnis
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.”
—Anne Roiphe (20th century)