HER curly locks of hair and warm smile evoke a rush of black and white images. Melodies evergreen start ringing in your ears, ‘ poovili poovili ponnanamyi….’
The girl who had hits raining down her roof had vanished from the silver screen one fine morning. But the flight of years seem a myth when we meet Vidhubala, for she is nothing short of a dazzling presence.
The rendezvous with the yesteryear beauty was loaded with anticipation. What could she be like? Haughty, old fashioned, a snob who looked down her nose at all the ‘stunts that is called cinema these days’?
But Vidhubala turned out to be a jolly good person, so full of zest for life and its challenges, the sort of woman you would want to be friends with because you know she can laugh out loud at those SMS jokes you have on your mobile.
Perhaps it’s just that timeless aura of familiarity about her that has brought her back on a reality show with a social cause. Vidhubala is donning the make-up again as mediator of Amrita TV’s ‘Kathayallithu Jeevitham’ , a platform where the channel helps parties involved in family court cases strike peace.
But, just like her, Vidhubala agreed to make the comeback for the sheer challenge that it posed. “I was impressed with the element of social cause, that I can be of some help to people. And moreover, this was not a job that would come easy, I knew I was going to be put in a very demanding role and that was what actually prompted me to try my hands at it”.
Vidhubala was always known to be a brainy beauty.
Daughter of famed magician K Bhagyanath and a graduate in psychology, cinema was never on her list of choices.
“I used to take part in the magic shows of my father which was where I was spotted by film directors. For almost all the roles that I did as a child artiste, the lure of a dance scene was the bait thrown at my parents, because I was learning dance from the age of three.”
Vidhubala debuted as a child artiste in ‘School Master’ at the age of eight. In the years that followed, the teenager found herself flooded with modelling offers and the fun-loving girl got herself busy with the ‘extracurricular’ activity, “because I was offered pretty knickknack in return".
A company that made vanity cases wanted the lass to model for them, and the Tomboyish Vidhu agreed on the condition that she would be gifted one of those cases. “I showed it around to my friends and had them drooling," she laughs.
Her entry into films as a heroine happened in 1974 in Hariharan’s ‘College Girl’ in which she was paired opposite none other than Prem Nazir.
“But acting in the movie was a much debated decision in my family. I was doing my degree at that time and my father was concerned about my studies. I remember him saying that the tag of being a film actor would follow you even if you quit after just one movie. After days of discussion, we decided to take up the project, provided I was allowed to attend the examinations which were round the corner."
And so the shooting started and the whole unit took a nap from 2-4 in the afternoon when the heroine, “in all that stuffy make up and the bumpy wig” would go write her exams at college.
“Films continued to be just something that I did for the fun of it for a long time still. But it was after my brother joined the Pune Film Institute that my attitude to cinema became serious."
And her brother later carved a niche for himself as one of the most talented cinematographers in the industry - Madhu Ambatt. “He would come back for holidays and teach me all that he learned at the Institute, and I began to look at cinema as a wonderful form of art.”
Vidhubala was paired opposite all the celebrated heroes of the time - Sathyan, Madhu, Jayan, Vincent and so on. She also shared screen space with the reigning heroines of her time like Sheela and Sarada. “Sheelamma used to live the character that she enacted. I remember seeing her on the sets of a movie where she played an old woman. As soon as she wore her make up, she stooped like a woman of that age and staggered around the sets, coughing and all that. I could never ever do that!” she pauses and lets out a sigh of exasperation, as if weighed down by the mere thought.
“I was never that serious about cinema, not at any point of my career," she confesses. “I always looked at the character I enacted from a third person view, I stood apart and tried to get to the soul of the character."
But there were occasions when she went that extra mile at work. “Like the movie ‘Njaval Pazhangal’ where I played a tribal girl. The role demanded an altogether different body language and mannerisms."
Vidhu was seldom in the habit of doing any homework and relied mostly on her improvisations. But it so happened that her big brother was rolling the camera for this film. “In one scene where I was smiling at something, my brother called ‘cut’ and he said - ‘you are smiling like a psychology graduate and not like a tribal girl!’ He told me I needed to put away that cultured behaviour and I wondered how on earth can I smile an uncultured smile," and she laughs out in that charming way of hers.
She also cherishes her villainous character in the film ‘Abhinayam’, which was also incidentally her last one, released in 1981.
What really made her quit movies?
She replies with no frills, “I was bored."
And then adds, “I was doing around 20 films a year that time and I was tired with the monotony of acting out the same kind of roles and living the same busy life. One of those days, I told my father that I wanted to quit. And he never asked me why. That was the kind of father he was."
Four years after she quit movies, Vidhubala got married to Murali Kumar, a businessman and producer of some her movies and settled in Kozhikode. Not even dance, her passion from childhood, found place among her new priorities.
“The only time I danced in those days was when I wanted to vent some high voltage emotion, could be anything - anger, joy or sorrow. I would shut myself in a room and dance till I felt drained."
Her responsibilities as the mother of Arjun, her only son, kept her more than busy. “When my son started going to school, I suddenly had a lot of time on hand again. So I worked for a while as clinical psychologist at a friend's school."
"Around that time, I thought about taking a PG in Psychology. And I realised that I had forgot all about applying for a degree certificate after my BA. We tried to secure one, but could not. So all that running back and forth from the sets to take the exams went in vain, I am not technically qualified to pursue a career,” she rues.
More recently, she has been doing voice dubbing for some Malayalam films. The latest were 'Naalu Penneugal' in which she lend voice to Nandita Das and in 'IG' for her contemporary, Lakshmi.
But for such once-in-a-blue-moon occasions, Vidhubala’s world was way removed from the hullaballoo of the tinsel town these past years. And Arjun had only known her as his homely, loving mother and used to say rather possessively, that he liked his mother better than ‘Vidhubala the actor’.
But her engineer son was in for a surprise recently when the family attended a wedding of someone who counted in the Malayalam filmdom. And to Arjun’s surprise, he saw the stars that he looked up to in awe come running to greet his mother. “And wonder-struck, he asked me later, - Amma, you really were a star then?!”
