Veteran actress Zeenat Aman, who was recently in Delhi, spoke about her films and directors and how in the era where roles for actresses were either sari-clad heroine or vamps in western clothes,

she played characters which had shades of grey. At a session titled, ‘Stories that matter with

Zeenat Aman’, organised by FICCI FLO, the actress told the audience that be it her character Sheetal in Roti Kapada Aur Makaan, who chooses a rich man over her poor lover, or her character Janice in Hare Rama Hare Krishna blowing smoke rings, she played characters with grey shades.

Aman said that the toughest films of her career were Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971) and Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978). The former, in fact, brought her instant stardom and she won the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Dev Anand’s sister. When Dev Anand was searching for an actress, nobody wanted to play his sister as they wanted to play the lead opposite him. And then he met the then newly-crowned Miss Asia Pacific Zeenat Aman. She further narrated that when Dev Anand saw her at a party, he thought that he had found his Janice for Hare Rama Hare Krishna as he was looking for someone who had “Indian looks but western upbringing and with a carefree attitude”. 

The actress recalls, “The film’s director O P Ralhan knew that Dev Anand was looking for a girl to play the role of his sister. A lot of actresses had turned down the role because they wanted to play the romantic lead. Nobody wanted to play the sister. So the director set up a meeting. Truth be told, at that time we were planning to leave the country and move away, so I think he was just impressed with my attitude. I was wearing a mini skirt, boots and smoking, and he thought to himself that I would be perfect for the role. He asked me to do a screen test, but of course, since I had studied abroad, my Hindi was atrocious, and I told him that I can’t do the screen test in Hindi, and then he said, ‘Fine, then do it in English.’ And once the camera and lights were on me, I was on.”

Talking about how she worked on her Hindi, she added, “When you know that there are certain areas of your life that are not up to the mark, then you have to work doubly hard. I remember an incident from Shalimar, where Dharmendra was in the leading role. It was the first major international production and we were shooting in Bangalore. We were shooting two versions together in Hindi and English at the same time for every scene from start to finish. It was so funny that every day after we would wrap up, Dharmendra would be in his room with his English tutor and I would be in my room with a Hindi tutor.”

The actress said any talk of pay parity among male and female stars during her time was ‘wishful thinking’. She said, “It was wishful thinking to hope for any equality. There was none at all. But I

think things are much better now. I think our girls are doing wonderful projects. They’re doing women-oriented films and they are asking for fair pay.”

When asked was there any sisterhood among actresses at that time, she said, “I see a lot of friendliness among actresses now (current generation), but back then everybody was busy doing their thing.”

Talking about doing unconventional roles in the era when only two kinds of roles were written for actresses, she said, “I was accepted by the audience at that time as an actress with grey shades – characters who were drug addicts, or characters who died of an overdose. Subsequently, writers wrote roles for me – good bad-girl or bad good-girl like in Roti Kapada Aur Makaan in which she leaves a poor man for a rich man, and then she gives her life for a poor man. Ultimately, nothing succeeds like success, so a lot of writers were writing these parts for me and some of the films did well.”

When asked about her favourite co-star, the actress said, “It never mattered to me who my leading co-star was, it always mattered to me who my director and my writer were. I could do scenes with anybody but I needed a good director behind the camera. I had the good fortune of working with a lot of directors who were actors like Dev Anand, Raj Kapoor, Shammi Kapoor, Manoj Kumar, Amjad Khan, Feroz Khan and Sanjay Khan. All these filmmakers were actors themselves. So they brought that extra bit of creativity to the table.”