Madhubala, actress - Revision history

Pdewan: /* An icon in Greece */

2018-03-29T23:12:13Z

‎An icon in Greece

Pdewan: /* The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills */

2018-03-29T23:04:49Z

‎The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills

Pdewan: /* Hollywood desires Madhubala */

2018-03-29T23:02:00Z

‎Hollywood desires Madhubala

Pdewan: /* The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills */

2018-03-29T22:54:50Z

‎The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills

Pdewan: /* Filmography */

2018-03-29T22:50:21Z

‎Filmography

Pdewan: /* Biography */

2018-03-29T22:49:46Z

‎Biography

Pdewan: /* Subhash K. Jha's biography */

2018-03-29T22:48:45Z

‎Subhash K. Jha's biography

Pdewan at 19:58, 27 March 2018

2018-03-27T19:58:36Z

Pdewan: /* The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills */

2018-03-19T23:21:40Z

‎The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills

Pdewan: /* See also */

2018-03-19T22:56:28Z

‎See also

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 The biggest star in the world has one final perfection in her name. The “bala” part is only a feminine ending, but “Madhu” means variously “fragrant,” “spring,” and “love.” It seems curiously right that free India should have chosen to worship an actress named “fragrant spring of love.”
 ==An icon in Greece==
 [http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/madhubala-5063241/   Sanghamitra Mazumdar | When Greece fell in love with Madhubala  | February 14, 2018 | ''Indian Express'']

← Older revision		Revision as of 23:04, 29 March 2018
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	The biggest star in the world has one final perfection in her name. The “bala” part is only a feminine ending, but “Madhu” means variously “fragrant,” “spring,” and “love.” It seems curiously right that free India should have chosen to worship an actress named “fragrant spring of love.”		The biggest star in the world has one final perfection in her name. The “bala” part is only a feminine ending, but “Madhu” means variously “fragrant,” “spring,” and “love.” It seems curiously right that free India should have chosen to worship an actress named “fragrant spring of love.”
		+	==An icon in Greece==
		+	[http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/madhubala-5063241/ Sanghamitra Mazumdar \| When Greece fell in love with Madhubala \| February 14, 2018 \| ''Indian Express'']
		+
		+
		+
		+	Hindi films have always enjoyed a fan following across the world. Decades ago, Raj Kapoor used to be a household name in Russia, and songs like Awara Hun and Mera Joota Hai Japani picturised on him are still popular in that country. Amitabh Bachchan is one of the most popular stars in Egypt, while Peru, Germany, Nigeria go gaga for Shah Rukh Khan. Aamir Khan’s Dangal is still breaking records in China. There are several countries where Bollywood broke language and culture barriers and reigned supreme for decades.
		+
		+	Greece, for example, was one country that connected with India through its Hindi films and the music in them. Greek educationist Helen Abadzi had written a thoroughly researched article around a decade ago on how Hindi movies conquered Greece around 1960, millania after Alexander the Great conquered northwest India.
		+
		+	And one of the stars who ruled the Greek hearts was our very own Madhubala, one of the most beautiful actresses of all time.
		+
		+	Madhubala became so popular in Greece in the late 1950s and early 1960s that the European country made the “Venus of Indian cinema” immortal by dedicating a song to her in its own language. Sung by popular Greek singer Stelios Kazantidis, the song is a tribute to Madhubala’s ethereal beauty, her poise and grace. While it is not clear who wrote it — Kazantidis himself or a female lyricist Eftihis Papayiannopoulou — the composition belongs to the Rebetico/Laiko genre of Greek music.
		+
		+	In her article, ‘When India Conquered Greece: Hindi Films of the 50s in Greece’, Abadzi writes how Greece fell in love with Hindi movies, their music, and actors.
		+
		+	The economic condition of Greece was bleak in the early 1950s, and World War II and a subsequent civil war had destroyed the countryside and killed many inhabitants. There was a climate of desperation and it was then that Hindi movies made an indelible impression, she writes.
		+
		+	Most of the Hindi movies made during the time were love stories set in a background of tangled family relations, poverty, exploitation, and misery with the plot interspersed with songs and dances.
		+	madhubala photos Madhubala in the movie Mughl-E-Azam.
		+
		+	“The plots of the movies resonated with the wounded Greek psyche. Suffering women, street children who had to drop out of school, jealous sisters-in-law, vengeful mothers-in-law, interdependencies, betrayals, and frequent unhappy ends resonated with the difficult choices of poorly educated Greek people subsisting in large cities. In particular, the characters appealed to poor women. The maidservants and factory workers saw themselves depicted on the movie screen, hoping for deliverance,” Abadzi writes.
		+
		+	According to her, Mother India, Awaara and other movies established Nargis as the great priestess of the family dramas, with Madhubala a close second. “The ability of these heroines to express pain made the beautiful and haunting songs that they sang instant hits. It was only natural that the emotions of the poor Greeks would be expressed through those very same melodies,” she writes.
		+
		+	Starting in 1959, many Hindi songs had their Greek versions sung by established artistes. While ‘Madhubala’, also known as ‘Mandoubala’, was a specific work dedicated to the beautiful actress, most of the over 110 Greek numbers were inspired from popular Hindi songs.
		+
		+	The [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7SuIRkYkL8 Madhubala song] is a lover’s cry for his beloved whom he has lost. It was a huge hit and has remained popular to this date. The song is also lovingly hummed in Cyprus, which speaks Greek. Loosely translated, part of the lyrics will mean something like this:
		+
		+	“I wish I could see you and then die, my dear.
		+
		+	My soul wants only this.
		+
		+	Since I lost you, I’m melting,
		+
		+	I cry out your name with pain,
		+
		+	Mahdubala, Mahdubala.”
		+
		+
		+
		+	'' At least seven versions of [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=madhubala+greek+song+ this song] are available on YouTube. ''

	=Her films=		=Her films=

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 But Madhubala has already etched herself in our hearts will always remain there forever. (LMN)
 ==Hollywood desires Madhubala ==
 In 1951, celebrity photographer James Burke came to India to shoot a mesmerising session with Madhubala for Life magazine. Theatre Arts magazine in the August 1952 issue, featured her as, “The Biggest Star in the World - and she’s not in Beverly Hills”. Hollywood biggies clamoured to cast her. Filmmaker Frank Capra, besotted by her beauty, tried to cast her when he visited Mumbai for a film festival. But allegedly her father Attaullah Khan refused all the offers.  ([http://www.filmfare.com/features/best-of-filmfare-golden-50s_-7910-6.html  ''Filmfare ''])
 =Her films=

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:54, 29 March 2018
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	Married Kishore Kumar, who converted to Islam for this.		Married Kishore Kumar, who converted to Islam for this.
−
−	~~=='' The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills '' ==~~
−
−	~~David Cort, LIFE magazine, August, 1952~~
−
−
−	~~The actress with the greatest following, in numbers and devotion, is not to be found in Hollywood, but on the opposite side of the planet — in Bombay, India.~~
−
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in LIFE magazine page.jpg\| Madhubala in LIFE magazine <br/> LIFE called her “The Biggest Star in the World - and she’s not in Beverly Hills”. \|frame\|500px]]~~
−
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in LIFE magazine.jpg\| Madhubala in LIFE magazine <br/> Photographer: James Burke, 1951. \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in LIFE magazine3.jpg\| Madhubala in LIFE magazine <br/> Photographer: James Burke, 1951 \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in LIFE magazine6a.jpg\| Madhubala in LIFE magazine <br/> Photographer: James Burke, 1951 \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in colour.jpg\| Madhubala, a rare colour photograph. Photographer: probably James Burke, 1951 \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in colour2.jpg\| Madhubala, a rare colour photograph. Photographer: probably James Burke, 1951 \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in colour3.jpg\| Madhubala, a rare colour photograph. \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in colour4.jpg\| Madhubala, a rare colour photograph. \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in colour5.jpg\| Madhubala, a rare colour photograph. \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in colour6.jpg\| Madhubala, a rare colour photograph. \|frame\|500px]]~~
−	~~[[File: Madhubala in colour7.jpg\| Madhubala, a rare colour photograph. \|frame\|500px]]~~
−
−
−	~~Her name is Madhubala. She is nineteen years old, a small girl with arching eyebrows and a shy, sweet smile, who has risen to the top of the Indian movie industry in the last two years.~~
−
−	Madhubala’s local audience is taken from the 420,000,000 people of India and Pakistan (about the population of the United States and all western Europe combined). Her pictures have also a lively export market in Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and East Africa. In India alone, the movie theatres take in 75,000,000 paid admissions a month, at prices as low as three cents a ticket.
−
−	On an average, since she first became a star, Madhubala has completed four pictures a year and at one point early this year was under contract to make as many as nine for various producers — working on two or three at the same time.
−
−	~~She is the highest paid star in her industry, and her industry is fast catching up with the biggest.~~
−
−	India now produces nearly 300 feature pictures a year, as against Hollywood’s 450. About a dozen of India’s films in any year will star Madhubala. A single issue of a movie magazine will run a slew of advertisements, reviews and pictures of Madhubala. And both she and the Indian movie industry can justly claim that they have hardly started.
−
−	American ignorance of Madhubala is understandable. For one thing, the riotous movie boom in India dates only from around 1943. For another, Madhubala’s ascendancy is only two years old, and she herself is a new phenomenon in the eastern world.
−
−	The story of India for the past ten years may be condensed as: The war, the movie boom, independence, and Madhubala. Independence and Madhubala seem to go together, for reasons that may seem baffling to westerners. It may help to explain what India looks for in a beautiful woman. It does not, of course, want a blonde. The invariable attributes of an Indian actress are large, languishing brown eyes, a full-lipped mouth and an aquiline nose. India’s former stars had these, but they were usually generously padded ladies given to overacting.
−
−	Madhubala has the classic features, but she has added something. Her modeling is both finer and bolder. She turns the traditional wantonness of a Hindu actress into spiritual recklessness, controlled by pride and fastidiousness. Madhubala not only has intelligence; she even looks intelligent. She uses a typical stare in her love scenes that is both confiding and questioning, as if she were challenging the hero to be all she is supposed to think he is. With a look, she defies the Hindu dogma that a man is superior to a woman.
−
−	Furthermore, Madhubala has the wide shoulders and athletic body of the modern girl the world over, a type fairly new to India. She walks like a dancer, that is, a western ballet dancer, not a Hindu dancer, who usually stands bowlegged on her heels and monotonously wiggles her neck and arms.
−
−	AS A NEW type in India, Madhubala must probably stand for the ideal of the free Indian woman or what India hopes the free Indian woman will be. She is in that sense a symbol of the advance guard of a revolution.
−
−	~~India’s choice of Madhubala becomes truly remarkable when it is remembered that she is a Moslem, and a classic Moslem type, while India is preponderantly Hindu.~~
−
−	She was born Mumtaz Ataullah in Delhi in 1933, the fourth of ten children of Ataullah Khan, At the age of six, she was spotted by a movie producer, given the name of Madhubala and a small part; at a wage of $45 a month. This prospect of added income induced her father, when she was nine, to move his family to Bombay, the center of India’s movie industry.
−
−	An atmosphere of sheer nightmare quickly closed in on the family. Almost immediately the dock explosion and fire of April 14, 1944, (a historic date in India) wiped out their home and possessions. Appropriately, the family escaped death or injury because they had been to the movies, at a theater distant from the scene of the disaster.
−
−	In 1947 came the tragic communal disorders, during which the Hindus drove 6,000,000 Moslems out of India, massacring half a million and abducting thousands of women. Madhubala and her sisters knew they were among the hunted. But by this time she had acted in five pictures for Ranjit Movietone, in the last one as a star, and her position probably saved the family.
−
−	It is a measure of India’s ability to grow in tolerance that, as it became more used to freedom, it reversed itself and chose to love the Moslem Madhubala. However, anti-Moslem prejudice must continue to be one of her chief problems. She is the victim of a whispering campaign that accuses her, for example, of eating the meat of the cow, which is sacred to Hindus. To offset such rumors she gave her life savings of 50,000 rupees to the Bengal Refugee Fund last winter to help Hindu refugees from Moslem East Pakistan. Her friends said that this proved her “a real daughter of Mother India.” Her enemies turned the gift against other Moslem stars: “Why not also Dilip Kumar, Nargis, Suraiya, Yaqub? Or are they hoarding money to be sent to Pakistan?”
−
−	Madhubala’s private life is in marked contrast to the roles she plays in the movies. Most often, though not invariably, she takes the part of a bad girl. The typical Indian plot casts her as a rich and frivolous heiress pursuing a poor but noble youth. India is more and more freely borrowing themes from such Western plays as Smilin’ Through and Pygmalion.
−
−	Madhubala has a delicately sensuous figure. The movie magazines have called her “the Venus of the screen.” The advertisements for one picture sarcastically show her cowering under the waving hoofs of a rearing stallion. It should be added, however, that a kiss or any extensive exposure of the female person is never permitted in an Indian movie.
−
−	The biggest star in the world has one final perfection in her name. The “bala” part is only a feminine ending, but “Madhu” means variously “fragrant,” “spring,” and “love.” It seems curiously right that free India should have chosen to worship an actress named “fragrant spring of love.”
−

	==Subhash K. Jha's biography==		==Subhash K. Jha's biography==

@@ Line 136: / Line 136: @@
 ==Hollywood desires Madhubala ==
 In 1951, celebrity photographer James Burke came to India to shoot a mesmerising session with Madhubala for Life magazine. Theatre Arts magazine in the August 1952 issue, featured her as, “The Biggest Star in the World - and she’s not in Beverly Hills”. Hollywood biggies clamoured to cast her. Filmmaker Frank Capra, besotted by her beauty, tried to cast her when he visited Mumbai for a film festival. But allegedly her father Attaullah Khan refused all the offers.  ([http://www.filmfare.com/features/best-of-filmfare-golden-50s_-7910-6.html  ''Filmfare ''])
 =Filmography=

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 The biggest star in the world has one final perfection in her name. The “bala” part is only a feminine ending, but “Madhu” means variously “fragrant,” “spring,” and “love.” It seems curiously right that free India should have chosen to worship an actress named “fragrant spring of love.”
-=Biography=
 ==Subhash K. Jha's biography==
 ''' Magical Madhubala '''

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-[[File: Dilip Kumar3.jpg|With Dilip Kumar in Mughal e Azam (released in 1960)The B&W scenes of the film were colourised in 2004; to see this frame in colour go to [[Dilip Kumar]]|frame|500px]]
+[[File: Dilip Kumar3.jpg|With Dilip Kumar in Mughal e Azam (released in 1960)The B&W scenes of the film were colourised in 2004; to see this frame in colour go to [[Dilip Kumar: his films, their box office performance, awards, career]]|frame|500px]]
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