Bollywood legend Rekha’s 50 years in film: from Sawan Bhadon, to Silsila and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, the actress who took on India’s misogynistic movie industry
A life full of triumph, tragedy and secrets – the actress born Bhanurekha Ganesan was labelled a ‘man-eater’ after rumours of romances with co-stars Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Mehra, and lost her husband Mukesh Agarwal after just seven months of marriage
For 50 years and counting, Bhanurekha Ganesan – the actress better known by stage name Rekha – has had one of the most fascinating career orbits in all of Bollywood. Success did not come easy and she had to learn the art of reinvention which later became her trump card. While magazine-spread scandals and personal tragedy transformed her from a once outspoken and candid person into an elusive and media-cautious celebrity, Rekha will always be remembered as a true icon of the underdog.
Her early life was shaped by her Tamil superstar father, Gemini Ganesan, leaving her mother, Pushpavalli, for his other family. This forced Rekha, now aged 66, to become a child actress at the age of 13 to help out financially. She relocated to Mumbai without understanding a word of Hindi (Telugu is her mother tongue) and apparently hated every minute of it. Still, she made her first film appearances – she was on her way.
The introverted Rekha became an overnight star with Sawan Bhadon (1970), though the professional praise was balanced by highly personal criticism. She took on a variety of complex characters: in Ghar (1978) she played a housewife dealing with the aftermath of rape, shone as Zohra Begum in Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978) and in comedy Khubsoorat (1980) played a young woman with modern norms.
While her career clocked milestone after milestone, her personal life took a tumble. The media loved and hated Rekha from the beginning. They praised her acting and overnight makeovers – from the plump and dark-skinned girl in Sawan Bhadon to the toned vixen of Do Anjaane (1976) – but vilified her for her dating history. Rekha was linked with numerous actors; even long rumoured to have married her co-star Vinod Mehra, which she finally debunked only decades later.
Above all, her alleged affair with the young Amitabh Bachchan, who was (and still is) married to Jaya Badhuri, was a constant thorn. Gossip mills scorned her as the “other woman”, a “man-eater” and worse, a “nymphomaniac”.
In his unofficial biography Rekha: The Untold Story, author Yasser Usman wrote, “In typically sexist style, the film industry and the press repeatedly singled out Rekha and maligned her – never her partners – for her supposed relationships”. Neither Rekha nor Bachchan have ever confirmed a past romance.