Iconic Indian actress Zohra Sehgal featured on Google Doodle on Tuesday, as the search engine paid her a special tribute. Her film ‘Neecha Nagar’ had released today in 1946 at the Cannes Film Festival and had reportedly won the festival’s highest honour, the Palme d’Or prize.
Sehgal, a quintessential Bollywood diva who essayed character roles with aplomb in a career spanning over seven decades in both theatre and cinema, died in July 2014. Sehgal started her career as a dancer with Uday Shankar in 1935. She had appeared in many Bollywood films as a character actor as well as in English language films besides television series and plays.
Often called the grand old lady of Bollywood, she last appeared in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya (with Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor) in 2007. She acted in hits like Cheeni Kum (with Amitabh Bachchan), Dil Se (with Shah Rukh Khan and Manisha Koirala), Veer Zaara (Shah Rukh and Preity Zinta), Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (Salman Khan and Aishwarya Rai) and Bend It Like Beckham.
Born on April 27, 1912 in Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh in a traditional Muslim family, Sehgal, third of her seven siblings, grew up in Chakrata near Dehradun and was sent to Lahore to pursue her higher education.
As a dancer, she performed across Japan, Egypt, Europe and the U.S.. She married scientist, painter and dancer Kameshwar Sehgal in August 1942. The couple had two children, Kiran and Pavan. Kameshwar died in 1952 and Zohra raised the children all by herself.
