Meena Kumari

She was born Mahjabeen Bano in 1933 into a poor family; her father was a struggling musician and actor. There is a much-repeated story that the family, unable to afford her, briefly considered giving the newborn away — an origin as bleak as anything she would later play.

As a small child she was put to work in films to support the household, billed as 'Baby Meena.' She grew up on film sets rather than in a classroom, carrying the weight of the family's finances almost from the moment she could speak lines.

As an adult she became Meena Kumari, and no one has ever played sorrow as she did. In Baiju Bawra (1952), Parineeta (1953), Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962) and a string of others she gave grief a face — the wronged wife, the doomed lover, the woman broken by a world that would not let her be happy.

She won the Filmfare Best Actress award multiple times and was, for a stretch of the 1950s and 60s, both a critical darling and a box-office force. She was also a serious Urdu poet who wrote under the pen name 'Naaz' — verses full of the same melancholy that defined her screen work.

In 1952 she secretly married the filmmaker Kamal Amrohi, who was older and already married. The union was, for years, the central relationship of her life — and the source of much of its pain. It became increasingly controlling and unhappy, and by the mid-1960s they had separated.

The collapse of the marriage, combined with the loneliness beneath her fame, pushed her toward alcohol. What began as a way to cope hardened into a dependence that would eventually kill her.

Amrohi's magnum opus Pakeezah — with Meena Kumari as the tragic courtesan Sahibjaan — was in production, on and off, for some fourteen years, stalled by their estrangement and by money and technical troubles. It finally released in February 1972 to a slow start that grew into adoration once audiences understood what they were watching.

By then Meena Kumari was gravely ill with cirrhosis of the liver. On 31 March 1972, barely weeks after Pakeezah reached cinemas, she died at just 38. It was as though she had willed herself to live until her masterpiece was seen — and once it was, there was nothing left to hold on for. The Tragedy Queen had written, and lived, the saddest ending of all.