Madhubala worked through her greatest films — including the years-long Mughal-e-Azam shoot — while concealing a congenital heart defect that the medicine of the time could not repair.
Madhubala had been born with a ventricular septal defect, a hole in the heart. She kept working through demanding productions, including the physically taxing Mughal-e-Azam, as her health quietly deteriorated.
There was no effective surgical treatment available to her, and after years of decline she died in 1969 at just 36. That she gave some of Indian cinema's most iconic performances while gravely ill is central to her enduring myth.
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