Popularity
Her popularity was so immense that often movie producers would line up at her door to sign her for their upcoming movie projects. Her career peaked at the time when most heroines were engulfed in Indian attribute and Babi was one among the few actresses whose attire was completely westernized and this made her unique among different breed of female artistes. Parveen Babi along with Zeenat Aman with their chiselled looks, well-sculpted bodies and anglicised accents donned the mantle of archetypal Indian heroine and imparted to the female prima donna of Bollywood their characteristic mannerisms forever .
As Babi’s personality symbolized western standards, it would be difficult for Bollywood producers to personify her role in Indian sentiments. Hence she was given roles which were glamorous and represented standards of a film star quality and established her status as a ‘’first female superstar of Bollywood’’ or the’’ commercially successful Heroine’’ and this paved the way to differ herself from the other contemporary actress in the Bombay film Industry. She had appeared in most of the commercially successful films of that era and her famous co-stars include Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Feroz Khan, Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna, Vinod Khanna, Manoj Kumar, Rishi Kapoor who were all the leading stars of 1970’s and 1980’s. In her acting career, which spanned for almost ten years, she has acted in more than fifty films, of which ten were considered to be best. These films were also blockbusters of those times. Parveen Babi replaced the image of saree clad, conventional Indian lead actresses with a glamorous and self-dependent woman look. She never shied away from portraying roles of women having a live-in relationship with men and consuming alcohol openly, both of which were a taboo in those times.
She would often appear in film songs which have become the craze of those generations and those song picturisations involved glamorous costumes and ravishing film sets and in time would become hugely popular and this include the ones like ’’ Jawaani Jaaneman’’, ‘’Raat baaki baat baaki’’ in Namak Halaal, ‘’ Jeete hain shaan se’’ in Shaan(film) and deliberately this popularity made her among the highest paid actresses in Bollywood at those times. She would appear in front page of every film magazine whether the ‘’filmfare’’, ‘’the stardust’’ or even the prestigious ‘’Time (magazine)’’.
Read more about this topic: Parveen Babi
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“A more problematic example is the parallel between the increasingly abstract and insubstantial picture of the physical universe which modern physics has given us and the popularity of abstract and non-representational forms of art and poetry. In each case the representation of reality is increasingly removed from the picture which is immediately presented to us by our senses.”
—Harvey Brooks (b. 1915)
“The nation looked upon him as a deserter, and he shrunk into insignificancy and an earldom.... He was fixed in the house of lords, that hospital of incurables, and his retreat to popularity was cut off; for the confidence of the public, when once great and once lost, is never to be regained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)