Madhubala

She was born Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi in Delhi in 1933, the fifth of eleven children in a family that knew real hardship. To help support them she began working in films as a child, from around the age of nine, appearing as 'Baby Mumtaz.'

The name Madhubala came later, with adulthood and stardom. By her mid-teens she was carrying films, and the industry had begun to grasp that it had found not just a beautiful newcomer but a genuine star.

Her breakout came at sixteen with Bombay Talkies' ghostly hit Mahal (1949), whose haunting song 'Aayega Aanewala' became a sensation and made her a household name. Over the next decade she appeared in more than seventy films and was, at one point, the highest-paid star in the country.

Her fame reached beyond India. In 1952 the American magazine Theatre Arts ran a feature that called her 'the biggest star in the world,' with photographs that introduced her to Western readers. On screen she moved effortlessly between comedy — as in Mr. & Mrs. '55 (1955) — and high tragedy, but it was her face that audiences never forgot.

Her defining role was Anarkali, the doomed court dancer of K. Asif's epic Mughal-e-Azam (1960) — a production so vast it took years to complete. She played it while her health was quietly collapsing: she had been born with a ventricular septal defect, a hole in the heart, that could not be repaired by the medicine of the time.

The strain of the shoot, including a famous sequence in which she performed in heavy chains, took a visible toll. The film became one of the most celebrated in Indian history; the woman at its centre was, even then, running out of time.

Her long romance with Dilip Kumar, her co-star and one of the biggest stars of the age, ended not privately but in public: the two gave evidence on opposite sides of a 1957 court case connected to the film B.R. Chopra's Naya Daur, and the relationship never recovered.

In 1960 she married the singer and actor Kishore Kumar. But her heart continued to fail, and after years of illness she died on 23 February 1969, nine days after her 36th birthday. She left behind a body of work, and a myth of beauty and sorrow, that Indian cinema has never stopped mourning.