16 October 2009
Right now she's doling out face-saving statements, all of them denying the presence of producer/director Aditya Chopra in her life.
Lucklessly, she isn't fooling anyone, particularly the staff of Chopra's sprawling Yash Raj studio where she lives up to her name, reigning there like a queen. In fact, some of the staffers have nicknamed her Queen Victoria.
Like Kareena Kapoor, Rani Mukherjee has not been able to handle her success. From a fresh-faced ingenue, eager to learn the ropes of Bollywood, she has become tougher than nails and hands out bucket loads of abuse if she is bugged, be it with her spotboy or make-up assistant.
How do I know this? Well, ?simply because I've been witness to it. She wasn't aware that I ?was in the adjoining room of her make-up suite during the shoot of Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna in ?New York when I heard her break into the kind of expletives you would be shocked to hear in a ?bar brawl. On being informed ?that I was in the next room, she quickly moved to another floor of the hotel.
Evidently, Mukherjee, like Kapoor, has temporary memory loss about the early years when she worked to establish herself as a heroine of some value in Bollywood. Thirteen years ago she had made her debut with a B-grade flop titled Raja ki Aayegi Baraat. Yet her performance was powerful even then, and was noticed instantly by Aditya Chopra.
When, as editor of Filmfare in 1997, I had asked Chopra casually about who should win the magazine's Sensational Newcomer Award, he immediately said, "Rani without a doubt. She's an amazing actress." Her movie had crashed though, so she lost out in the race.
As the years advanced though, it was obvious Chopra had been right, with Mukherjee achieving the status of number one heroine with a chain of commercial as well as critical hits. Despite her much-discussed association with the Yash Raj banner, to the point of acting exclusively for their films, Mukherjee's best performance has arguably been in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black. Taking on the role of the deaf-mute girl essayed by Patty Duke in the original Hollywood film, The Miracle Worker, she was extraordinary.
Yet the country's most prestigious National Best Actor Award was denied to her. This was unfair, especially since the award went to Amitabh Bachchan for the same film. He was first-rate, but then so was Mukherjee.
After Black, lamentably, it's been a downward curve for Mukherjee. She insulted the same journalists who had promoted her and was rude at a press conference in Varanasi in the midst of shooting for Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. After a backlash, she was forced to apologise for speaking inconsiderately.
A top-rung actor who has featured with her in several well-remembered films commented, "She's losing it. Can you imagine, while we're doing a scene together, she tells me how to act." Quite a few of her films bit the dust: Mangal Pandey: The Rising, Paheli, Laaga Chunari.., Baabul, Tara Rum Pum Pum, Thoda Pyar Thoda Magic and Saawariya in which she hammed it up as a streetwalker.
Her mannerisms became irritating, the most prominent being the way she sheds tears. The rivulets of glycerine became all too familiar. Simultaneously, rumours about her 'secret marriage' with Chopra surface regularly before quickly disappearing.
She was also held responsible, perhaps unfairly, for the break-up of his marriage with his childhood sweetheart Pooja. Her brother, Raja, turned mega-ambitious. Not quite content with designing his sister's clothes, he became a film producer and then a director.
The 31-year-old actress could not sense that she was no longer being featured opposite the three Khans — Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman — who moved on to younger actresses like Deepika Padukone, Asin and Katrina Kaif. Blaming the thickening gloom on bad luck, she shifted from her new bungalow back to her apartment, where she hoped to retrieve a modicum of her earlier stature.
Has she? Well, yes and no. Dil Bole Hadippa has been an average success. However, her senior co-stars said that she often bullied the film's debutante director, Anurag Singh, and ghost-directed quite a few of the scenes herself. Be that as it may, her performance as a woman who would be a cricketer showed flashes of the vintage Mukherjee: likeable and technically perfect.
There's a great actress in her, but we'll only see her skills if and when she gets real and reads the writing on the wall. She has to understand that she is no longer the queen of all she surveys. Until then, I can only plead, "Wake up."
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/weekend/inside.asp?xfile=/data/weekend/2009/October/weekend_October52.xml§ion=weekend&col=
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