Parveen Babi View Biography 229 Views

From being the first Indian actress to be featured on the cover of TIME magazine to being declared suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, Parveen Babi is truly the realtime tragedy queen of Indian cinema.

Born into a Babi family, a tribe of Pashtuns who settled in Gujarat, Parveen Babi became a top notch fashion model between 1972 and 1973 and even though she made her debut in a flop film she was noticed by the industry and soon was on way to make it big alongwith Zeenat Aman, Rekha and other starts of the 70’s. Incidentally, the male lead role in her debut film was no other but famous cricketer Salim Durrani.

She broke barriers, was considered a glamour doll and beat her contemporaries to make it to the cover of TIME magazine in 1976. She starred in a series of hit films opposite the most successful male stars: Deewar, Shan, Namak Halal and many others, while Jenny in Amar Akbar Anthony would perhaps be the role she will be remembered forever.

By 1983, the western attired, anglicised accented Babi dominated the Hindi film industry along with Zeenat Aman, opted out of the film profession and started a business of interior decoration. Then, at the peak of her career, she disappeared. She travelled all over the world and it seemed she had a very difficult time, the worst being dispatched to a general ward for mental patients in New York.

She returned in 1989, bloated with weight, and from then till her death, she lived a miserable existence. She filed cases against her co stars, accusing them of conspiring to kill her, or holding evidence of an international mafia. She named all leading film personalities in her cases, from Amitabh Bachchan to Sanjay Dutt.

Broken affairs, misplaced priorities, failure in life, Babi turned in to a recluse, suffered from diabetes and died in her house. Her body was recovered three days after her death.

Well, Pyar Karna Wale, Pyar Kartey Hain…Shaan Se…