Saif Ali Khan on the 'strangest and worst advice' he ever got: "Don't tell anyone you were married"

Saif Ali Khan has never been the type to hide inconvenient truths. So when a senior actor from Bollywood's old guard quietly pulled him aside early in his career and told him to keep his marriage to Amrita Singh a secret, the advice landed somewhere between baffling and insulting.

"I remember a senior actor from the second generation telling me not to tell anyone that I was married," Saif told News 18. "I don't know why he said that. Maybe he thought it would affect my image and fan following. But I found it to be the strangest and worst advice anyone had ever given me."

The Marriage Nobody Was Supposed to Know About

The year was 1991. Saif was 21, freshly removed from the film he had been shooting, "Bekhudi," and by most measures not yet anyone in the industry. Amrita Singh, on the other hand, was 33 and among the most recognizable faces in Hindi cinema. They had met on that very set, stayed in touch after Saif's exit from the project, and what began as conversation quietly became something much more serious.

The age gap was 12 years. The professional gap was even wider. None of it stopped them.

13 Years, Two Kids, One Divorce

Their marriage lasted until 2004. Sara Ali Khan and Ibrahim Ali Khan were born during those years, both of whom have since stepped into the film industry themselves. The split, when it came, was final. Amrita never remarried. Saif, after a few years, began his relationship with Kareena Kapoor Khan, whom he married in 2012. They now have two sons together, Taimur and Jeh.

The Advice He Cannot Forget

What makes "I found it to be the strangest and worst advice anyone had ever given me" so striking is not just that he ignored it but that it clearly never left him. The logic behind it, that a young actor's marketability depended on audiences believing he was romantically available, was already a tired industry formula in 1991. That someone still believed it enough to whisper it like something useful says more about Bollywood's old anxieties than it does about Saif's choices.