Madhuri Dixit

Madhuri Dixit was born in 1967 in Mumbai into a middle-class Marathi family, a trained Kathak dancer who was studying microbiology and, by her own telling, quite shy. Films were not the grand plan; she drifted into them almost tentatively, and her first few years brought little success.

For a while it looked as though she might be an also-ran. Then came the film that changed everything.

In 1988 the song 'Ek Do Teen' from Tezaab made Madhuri an overnight sensation — a dance number so popular it turned an entire nation's attention onto a single performer. What followed was one of the great runs in Bollywood history.

Through Ram Lakhan, Beta (and its blazing 'Dhak Dhak' number), Saajan, Khalnayak, Dil To Pagal Hai and above all Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994) — for a time the highest-grossing Indian film ever — she became simply the biggest female star in the country. She combined mass appeal, dazzling dance and real dramatic ability, and by the mid-1990s 'Madhuri' was shorthand for stardom itself.

In 1999, at or near the peak of her fame, Madhuri married Dr. Shriram Nene, a cardiovascular surgeon based in the United States. She moved to America, and over the following years largely stepped back from films to raise their two sons.

It was the choice few expected of a star so dominant: to leave the industry not because it had left her, but because she wanted a different life. For a decade she lived quietly in Denver, far from the spotlight she had ruled.

Then she came back. Madhuri returned to Mumbai and to films — with Aaja Nachle (2007), and later Dedh Ishqiya, Gulaab Gang and Total Dhamaal — and to the public eye as a judge and dancer on major television shows, where a new generation discovered why she had been worshipped in the first place.

The comeback did not have to match the impossible heights of the nineties to prove its point: that she had left as a choice, not a defeat, and could still hold a screen and a stage effortlessly. From a shy microbiology student to the queen of Bollywood, to a devoted mother in Denver, to a returning icon — Madhuri Dixit's story is one of the rare ones that ends, again and again, in triumph.