Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; October 19, 2017)

The first thing Shyam Benegal remembers about his protégé, Smita Patil, was her natural talent and reluctance as an actress. She was studying at St. Xavier’s College when he approached her to play the queen in a children’s film, Charandas Chor. “She was very hesitant. Her mother told her not to be silly and let the opportunity slip away,” he narrates.

Soon after, the filmmaker whisked her away to Chattisgarh for the shoot, where she was thrown in the company of Habib Tanvir’s village actors, some farmers, some local traders, who were reprising their roles from the original play. “Smita quickly became a part of the team, having no starry airs or pretensions, a quality that made her special even after she became Bollywood’s leading lady. She would haul the lights and the cables, serve meals. No one realised that she was homesick. Those days there were no cell phones, and in locations as remote as ours, you could at best book a lightning call from the local post office, which was not always possible. So Smita, who was away from her family for the first time, wrote a letter to her mother every day, but otherwise never let slip just how lonely she was,” he says.

The same year, she also played Naseeruddin Shah’s wife, Rukmini, in his Nishant, which went on to bag the National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi and was only the second Indian film in competition for the Palme d’ Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. “It was a huge honour, but being a poor ‘art’ filmmaker as compared to the other competitors who came from larger industries we had no money even to print posters. So I asked my heroines, Smita and Shabana Azmi, to drape themselves in gorgeous temple saris and walk up and down the Cannes Crussell. They immediately caught everyone’s eye and their photograph appeared on the front page of the local newspaper along with news of the Nishant screening and we had a packed house,” says Benegal, chuckling at the memory.

They did other films together, including Manthan and Bhumika. The latter was broadly based on the memoirs of Marathi actress Hansa Wadkar, Sangyte Aika, with Smita playing Usha, a role that spanned from 16 to 46. “It was a challenge as she was just around 22-23 at the time and had to literally grow up from an adolescent to a mature woman and to familiarise herself with the industry and its trappings. I had taken her to Cannes for Nishant, which was perhaps her first foreign trip. Bhumika fetched her the National Award and the Filmfare Award for Best Actress and she grew up to become one of our finest performers recognized the world over with a unique ability to blend into her surroundings,” he says, recalling the time when they were filming Manthan in Saurashtra, about 35-40 kms from Rajkot. “Smita who played a village woman, looked so much like one, that the college boys who had cycled all the way down from Rajkot after reading that a film unit was shooting in their part of the world, almost didn’t recognise her as she squatted on the floor of her home, leaning against the mud wall. They were whispering amongst themselves wondering about the heroine when one of them suddenly pointed to Smita.”

On October 17, Smita would have turned 62. Ask Benegal how he imagines she might have been today and he sighs, “I can’t, she never thought she would grow into an old lady. She would always say I’ll die young and though I would reprimand her for getting morbid, it happened that way.”