Rekha

She was born Bhanurekha Ganesan in 1954, daughter of the Tamil superstar Gemini Ganesan, though he did not acknowledge her for much of her early life. She was pushed into films young to support her family, with no glamour, no polish and little Hindi.

Her early Bollywood years were unkind. She was widely mocked in the press as plump, dark and awkward — the opposite of a heroine. For most newcomers that would have been the end. For Rekha it was the beginning of the most remarkable self-reinvention Indian cinema has seen.

Through the 1970s, by sheer discipline — diet, exercise, yoga, grooming, elocution — Rekha rebuilt herself into a figure of astonishing grace and beauty. The ugly-duckling jibes gave way to awe. She became the industry's reigning glamour icon, and, crucially, a serious actress.

In Umrao Jaan (1981) she gave one of Hindi cinema's greatest performances as the poet-courtesan of Lucknow, winning the National Film Award for Best Actress. In Khoobsurat, Khubsoorat, Silsila and later the fierce revenge drama Khoon Bhari Maang (1988), she showed range far beyond her image. She had turned herself, against every early prediction, into a legend.

For all her visibility, Rekha has always been intensely private, and the vacuum has been filled for decades by speculation — above all about a rumoured relationship with a major co-star, fuelled by their pairing in Silsila (1981). She has never confirmed or denied any of it, meeting every question with the same poised, deflecting grace.

That refusal to explain herself has only deepened her mystique. She built a persona so complete and self-contained that the public knows her image intimately and her private truth not at all — exactly as she seems to have intended.

In 1990 Rekha married Delhi industrialist Mukesh Aggarwal. Within months the marriage collapsed, and shortly afterward Aggarwal died by suicide. In the cruel aftermath, sections of the press turned on her, and she faced a wave of blame and innuendo over a private tragedy.

She endured it, as she has endured so much, in near silence, and went on. Today Rekha is an elder icon of Indian cinema — a Padma Shri recipient and, for a time, a nominated member of India's Rajya Sabha — still glamorous, still unknowable, still the subject of a fascination she has never once bothered to satisfy.