Early Life
One of the most prominent actresses of the golden era, Waheeda Rehman was born into a traditional Tamil, Urdu-speaking Muslim family in Chengalpattu, Tamil Nadu, British India. She and her sister learnt Bharatnatyam at Mumbai's Sri Rajarajeswari Bharata Natya Kala Mandir, where Guru T. K. Mahalingam Pillai, doyen among nattuvanars taught and performed on stage together. Her father, who was a district commissioner, died while she was in her teens.
It is a common misconception that Rehman was born in Hyderabad. “It’s a long story,” she says, “When I was in Chennai, I did two Tamil and four Telugu movies. In the first one, Kaalam Maari Pochu along with Gemini Ganesan a bilingual film which was made in Tamil and Telugu as Rojulu Maraayi, I did only a folk dance number in both Tamil and Telugu versions. However, it went on to become a hit! I was in Hyderabad celebrating its success and Guru Dutt happened to be there. He was on a lookout for new faces and heard that I could speak in Urdu. It is because he spotted me in Hyderabad that people assume I was born there.”
Her dream was to become a doctor but, due to circumstances and illness, she abandoned this goal. Instead helped by her supportive parents, she hit the silver screen with Telugu films Jayasimha (1955), followed by Rojulu Marayi (1955) and Tamil film Kaalam Maari Pochu (1956). It is in Vijaya-Suresh's Ram aur Shyam (a remake of Telugu movie Ramudu Bheemudu) in 1967 that Waheeda acted again under the direction of the topnotch Telugu director Tapi Chanakya who incidentally directed her movies Rojulu Maaraayi in Telugu (1955) and Kaalam Maaripochu in Tamil (1956).
Read more about this topic: Waheeda Rehman
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)