The Three Reigning Queens, Albums of Madhubala, Meena Kumari & Nargis Options

[swarapriya]

The Three Reigining Queens

One was a beauty queen. Madhubala was her screen name. The other was a tragedy queen. She was known as Meena Kumari to the movie fans. The third one was a romantic queen. She was known as Nargis. All three more or less came into the movie field just about the same time. All of them started as child artistes. They shaped the industry with their charismatic personalities. They showed how to smile, how to bear pain, and how to fall in love. Their personal lives were marred with tragedies. They died very young.

They set aside thier own problems to entertain us in their own inimitable way. They ruled the Hindi film world for nearly three decades, each in her own way. In the next few months we will take a look at the songs from their albums more closely.

This post has been edited by swarapriya: Mar 28 2010, 10:26 PM

[swarapriya]

Nargis - The Romantic Queen

Nargis was born in 1929 as Fatima Rashid. Her father was a Hindu and her mother a Muslim. She appeared as a child star when she was six years old in the film “Talash-E-Haq”. She acted in the movie as Baby Nargis. But she didn’t star in earnest until her next movie, “Tamanna”, in 1942 when she just turned a new teenager. Her first adult role was in Mehboob’s “Taqdeer” made in 1943. Her costar was Motilal.

As a romantic lady, she made many movies with Raj Kapoor, altogether 16 of them that is almost 30% considering that Nargis made only 50 plus movies in her professional acting career. But Nargis will be remembered for one role for the movie “Mother India (1957)”. In this movie, she gave a performance of her lifetime where she goes through many phases of life from a young bride and old mother. She won accolades and awards throughout the world for one of the greatest performances by any actress Indian movies has seen. She won the best actress award for her role at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. She still is the only woman to achieve that distinction.

After ending her apparent affair with Raj Kapoor, she married the fellow actor Sunil Dutt. Soon after the marriage she acted only in few movies. She returned to act in 1967 in “Raat Aur Din” a film her brother actor Anwar Hussain produced. She won the inaugural National Film Award for Best Actress for her performance in that movie. Incidentally, Nargis was the first movie personality to be honored with the Padma Shri award. She was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

Wit her husband she formed a cultural troupe whose mission was to go to frontiers to entertain Indian troops. The troupe successfully recruited many popular singers and actors for these performances.

Nargis developed pancreatic cancer. She was treated in New York but without much success. She returned to India but her ill health took her last breath away in 1981. She would have been 52 in another month. Her death came two days before her son, Sanjay Dutt’s, first movie “Rocky” was released. Sunil Dutt established a Cancer Foundation in her memory. The Foundation promotes research and development to find the cure for cancer.

In the next few months we will look at the songs from the movie albums in which Nargis starred. I don’t have her early work, but from late 40’s I have most of her albums in CDs that I can share. I am hoping that the Forum members can contribute songs for the missing albums.

Here is the filmography of Nargis ...