Between 1970 and 1980, Shabana Azmi drifted the wave of Indian cinema with her powerful performances in movies like Arth, Mandi, and Sparsh. Daughter of famous poet Kaifi Azmi, Shabana Azmi started her career from Ankur, directed by Shekhar Kapur after which she never looked back. She gave some immortal performances with his favourite actor Naseeruddin Shah and was counted as the most successful actresses of her time. Here we penned down 5 movies for which she took one step further to ace her acting.
Contents
1. Going Bald For A Movie
Shabana is one of the most versatile actresses in the entire Bollywood. She went bald for a movie Water, directed by Meera Nair while depicting the role of a widow in the movie. Shabana always shows complete commitment towards her characters. In one of her interview she once quoted:
“Acting has to come from truth, from your core. Aapki mitti geeli honi chahiye. We are scared of people when we don’t know them. From a prostitute to a house help, I always associated with the people I was going to play.”
2. Playing The Role Of Lesbian
This was one of the most controversial roles of Shabana’s life where she played the role of a lesbian romancing onscreen with Nandita Das. The movie “Fire” showed an intense drive of human depicting the several emotions and phases of a woman’s life.
We are all victims of a patriarchal mindset that privileges the boy over the girl. The solution is the mindset transformation. You can get laws in place, but for laws to be internalised, for mindsets to change.
3. Powerpack Performance In “Mandi’ As A Prostitute
Shyam Benegal’s piece of art depicts Shabana as self-seeking brothel owner making some valid point on today’s moral policing to a great extent. From Shabana’s Hyderabadi accent to her audacity in delivering dialogues will make you bow down in front of her talent for sure.
4. The Fierce “Godmother”
Playing the role of Santokben Jadeja, a mafia turned politician from Gujarat portrays the role of a strong lady who loves maternal adjectives as much as she loves her armour. Shabana’s role was quite determined and she has done complete justice to it. Taking about playing such roles at this age, she once said:
The trick of enjoying life is to accept your age. Don’t fight the years, grow with them.
5. Hunting Down Kids In Makdee
The role of a witch was quite a challenge for any mainstream actor, but Shabana took this challenge and never looked any hideous than this. Her role in the movie was quite terrifying that literally scared the hell out of kids. Her career has seen quite twists and turns throughout her life on which she once said:
I feel my career is all about being at the right place at the right time. When I came, the parallel cinema movement just happened. If I hadn’t got those opportunities then my talent would have just been a closely guarded secret that no one knew about.