Veteran actress Shabana Azmi recounted an anecdote from 1976 while she was starring opposite Shashi Kapoor.
Veteran actress Shabana Azmi stands as one of the industry’s most prolific actresses. Throughout her illustrious career, she has collaborated with numerous industry stalwarts, among them Shashi Kapoor, whom she admired since she was a child. In a recent conversation with Zoom, the actress disclosed that Prithviraj Kapoor was her immediate neighbour, and she reminisced that Shashi Kapoor used to visit the Kapoor patriarch’s house every Sunday.
Reflecting on her childhood at the age of nine, the ‘Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani’ actress revealed that she would diligently save her pocket money to purchase monochrome photographs of the late actor and have them autographed by him every weekend, further adding, “He’s the only person whose autograph I took on his photograph. For me, when I was suddenly cast opposite him in ‘Hira Aur Patthar,’ it was completely unbelievable and the thing about Shashi was that he schooled me.”
“That was his way of showing affection. He was crazy. I will give you an example. We were shooting for ‘Fakira’ and the song was ‘Dil Mein Tujhe Bithakar.’ Now, I went on set before he arrived and Satyanarayan ji was doing the choreography and I saw that the moves were very intimate and I was very young at that time and I had tears in my eyes and I left the set and my heart was thudding because I really didn’t want to do those shots,” the actress said, further adding, “So I went in and I told my hairdresser that I couldn’t do those shots and I started crying.”
Soon after, the ‘Deewar’ actor entered her room, and started to scold her. “He was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ So I said, ‘I can’t do those scenes.’ He said, ‘Why, when you became an actress and you said you want to become an actress, didn’t you realize you’d have to do such kinds of scenes, stupid girl,’ and he left,” the actress continued.
Shabana Azmi, who was shocked, remembered telling her hairdresser, “How mean is he, look at the way he’s speaking to me.” However, she was pleasantly surprised when she came back on the sets. “After half an hour, I went on the set and he had every move changed. This was the kind of person he was,” she reminisced.
After ‘Fakira,’ the duo starred opposite each other in several movies including ‘Hira Aur Patthar,’ ‘Chor Sipahee,’ ‘Atithee,’ and ‘Oonch Neech Beech.’