I was watching Jeetendra’s Tohfa the other day and recalled how Sridevi and Jaya Prada had taken Bollywood by a storm in the 80s. They were the first choice of every filmmaker and both had very quickly signed a dozen films with all the top actors including Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna and of course Jeetendra who in traduced the southern heroines to Bollywood.
In the coming decades, while Sridevi married Boney Kapoor and raised babies, Jaya Prada moved from cinema to politics. Her stint with cinema continued but the projects were not as attractive as in the olden days. Jaya Prada was aware of that and when she stopped enjoying the films she was doing, she moved back to Bangalore. Over the years, I often bumped into Jaya Prada both in Mumbai and Delhi and once asked her if she felt she had been reckless about her career? Because had she played her cards right, she would have still been active in movies.
Jaya Prada agreed she had signed films indiscriminately “I didn’t need to do those films; I didn’t need the money. I did them because I was just going through a lowly phase and taking wrong decisions so I have no one to blame but myself. When these films didn’t work, I turned restless and left the city”. And you never missed Mumbai and Hindi films? “Sometimes, I did when I watched an old film of mine on TV but the urge subsided just as quickly and around this time due to personal reasons, I shifted base from Bangalore to Hyderabad and that was a turning point”.
to be concluded