When Shefali Shah was 28, she played a 38-year-old Akshay Kumar’s mother on screen. 41-year-old Mona Singh played the role of 57-year-old Aamir Khan’s mother in ‘Laal Singh Chaddha’. 57-year-old Seema Biswas played 54-year-old Akshay Kumar’s mother in ‘Bachchhan Pandey’. What I’m trying to say is, female actors are reduced to the roles of mothers and grandmothers at an age where male actors comfortably play the lead romantic hero of a film.
Take for example the leading Bollywood male actors – Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar. They are all in their 50s but they still can play the lead romantic hero in a film. But alongside them, you won’t find a 50-year-old female actor playing the lead. Instead, female actors who are one or two decades younger are chosen.
Sarika Thakur and Neena Gupta opened up about this in a conversation, reported The Indian Express.
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Laying it down simply, Sarika said, “Playing mothers isn’t always a bad thing. It’s wrong when they ask you to play mothers to someone who is just four years younger than you in real life… There are so many men who are in their 50s, and they’re playing fathers, so it’s very good. In the old times, they used to keep dancing around bushes even after the age of 70.”
To this, Neena Gupta revealed that she once played Feroz Khan’s elder sister. And what is striking is that Feroz Khan is 20 years older than her!
“I once played Feroz Khan’s older sister… He was 20 years older than me… I have done many (roles like this), because at that time, we didn’t have TV shows or anything. We only had films, and these were the only roles we’d get,” she said.
What do you think of such treatment of female actors by the Hindi film industry?