Silk Smitha

She was born Vijayalakshmi in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, into a poor family, and had almost no formal schooling. As a girl she was married off young; the marriage was unhappy, and she left it and came to the film cities of the south looking for work.

She started at the bottom — touch-up and small jobs — before getting bit roles. She took the screen name Smitha, and after a memorable early appearance she became known by the name of her character: Silk. The transformation was total, from a poor, unschooled girl into a woman about to become one of the most recognised faces in the south.

Through the 1980s Silk Smitha became a genre unto herself. Producers across Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada cinema cast her in glamorous 'item' numbers and vamp roles, and her presence alone could improve a film's box-office prospects. It was said that a Silk Smitha song could rescue a struggling production.

She appeared in a huge number of films — by many accounts around 450 across the southern languages — and grew wealthy and powerful in an industry that rarely gave women either. For a time she owned her image completely: she named her price, and producers paid it.

But the very thing that made her a star also trapped her. She was almost never offered the substantial roles she wanted; to producers she was the seductress and nothing else. As the 1990s arrived, tastes shifted and the flood of offers began to thin.

She tried to move into film production and reportedly poured money into ventures that failed, leaving her in debt. Her personal relationships were turbulent and unhappy. The independence she had fought for began to slip away.

On 23 September 1996, Silk Smitha was found dead in her Chennai apartment, hanged. She was 35. The death was reported as suicide, and letters were said to point to financial ruin and heartbreak, though — as with much of her life — the full truth remains debated.

She left behind an extraordinary and contradictory legacy: a woman who conquered a male industry on her own terms yet could not escape the box it built around her. Fifteen years later, Vidya Balan's National Award-winning turn in The Dirty Picture (2011), inspired by Silk's story, made a new generation ask who the real woman behind the image had been.