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Neena stars in a whole new season of ‘Masaba Masaba’ with her equally unstoppable, unflappable daughter Masaba. Catch this 2019 interview 

Neena Gupta: “It’s a Great Time to Be a Woman in the Film Industry!”

Meet the Unstoppable, Unflappable Neena Gupta

Neena Gupta just turned sixty – and she’s having the time of her life. As she says, “It’s a great time to be a woman in the film industry!”

In Bollywood, male and female actors generally have very different career paths. Film heroes can continue to play roadside Romeos, college playboys prancing with teenage girls forever and audiences will totally buy it.  Heroines, once they are past their prime, automatically get the roles of mothers, mothers-in-law or mother figures. At an age when actresses are supposed to simply pack up their talents and fade away from the youth-obsessed Bollywood industry, Neena Gupta is having an extended, delicious springtime of challenging roles.

A consummate television actress in drama series like Saans and the winner of two National Film Awards, Neena Gupta’s career seemed to be waning. In a remarkable comeback, she suddenly has her hands full of the choicest assignments. She was just honored at the United Nations with a screening of Vikas Khanna’s The Last Color, a powerful film about women empowerment.

During her New York visit, I met her in her Manhattan hotel room for an interview.  Resplendent in an orange and shocking pink chiffon saree for a photo shoot, she looked so elegant and yet so down to earth, having kicked off her heels and totally at home, with her feet up on the sofa.

You feel the Neena Gupta you see is the authentic one, the real woman who tells it like it is.

 

In The Last Color, Neena plays Noor, an aging widow living a drab, colorless existence in Varanasi, abandoned by family and society. Yet she leaves herself open to little acts of defiance, of courage, overcoming barriers of caste and class to take on the nurturing of Chhoti, a struggling street child and rope-walker.  Having so little herself, Noor is still able to inculcate poetry, justice and self-worth into the child. Chhoti grows up to become an advocate who actually fights to bring about reforms for the rehabilitation of widows.

This is the same Neena Gupta who plays Priyamvada Kaushik– in Badhaai Ho– a much-married, much-harried housewife and the mother of grown up sons who shocks herself, her family and society by getting pregnant once again so late in life. The film was a huge success at the box office and Neena won the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress.

The other day wandering through YouTube, I came across Neena in yet another avatar – a short comedy Khujli – about  a middle-aged couple trying to have  physical intimacy in spite of  no space and an aging wheelchair bound mother-in-law. This short comedy in which she starred with Jackie Shroff, went on to win a Jio Filmfare Award. As always, Neena is totally natural and watchable, and bends all stereotypes.

In a way Neena is all these women in real life as she too has dealt with the vagaries of life with grace and inner reserves of strength, once again questioning society’s mores and creating her own solutions.

The actress has lots of juicy films lined up including  Sooryavanshi, Panga and Gwailor  – all with top stars, strong roles and complex story lines. She’s just signed on a Punjabi film, finished a short Sindhi film and has several delicious projects which she’s not allowed to speak about yet.

Although she has directed some TV series, does she see herself turning film director? She laughs, “No! People say if your shop is running well, then why open a different one?”  Yes, acting is all that she wants to do, now that she’s getting the choice roles.  She would like to play a cop – and we can just imagine what a tour de force she’ll be, beating out the top cops like Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan and Ranveer at their own game!

Many years ago, Neena had caused quite a hullabaloo in society by a relationship with West Indian cricketer Sir Vivian Richards and having a child out of wedlock with him. She boldly brought up her daughter Masaba as a single mother and has always been upfront about her life’s choices and the consequences.

While she feels that earlier, because of her personal life, she did not get as many good roles as she could have. Many in Bollywood also thought she had retired, since she had moved to New Delhi after her 2008 marriage to accountant Vivek Mehra.

Neena is nothing if not frank and she shares the fact that in 2017 she went on social media and actually posted on Instagram: ‘I live in Mumbai and working am a good actor looking for good parts to play’.   Amazingly, the post got attention and there was a complete turnaround after Badhaai Ho!

As she says, in cinema older women were regarded as used goods or ‘Kachra’ so Badhaai Ho! was a very special role for an older woman. “ The fact that the film became a hit prompted other people to take on different things and make films about older women. So that is the trend.”

Neena has always played three-dimensional full-blooded women rather than cardboard characters, and these are women whose dilemmas exist in real life and have undergone tensions. Her own life has been no different as she’s taken risks, made mistakes and taken the bull head-on, playing the cards she’s been dealt with.

Not every older actress can get complex roles like these – so where does her fountain of confidence come from?  Where does she get that spark, that never-say-die spirit that is so essentially her strength?

“It wasn’t a very smooth sailing from my childhood to here but I can forget the past and move on,” she says. “It’s not that it doesn’t come back to me – it keeps coming back.  I can laugh at myself. I can laugh at my mistakes, and move on.”

Neena was born in Calcutta in a middle-class family which moved to Delhi when she was a young girl. It was a simple life in Karol Bagh where the lights would be out by 9 pm. “We used to sleep on the terrace and I had my transistor with me and I used to listen to Vividh Bharti – that’s how I remember the lyrics of all the old songs,” she recalls. “The family would watch the news on Doordarshan and the weekly Hindi film sitting around the television set. So there was nothing. I come from that kind of a background.”

Yet Neena was able to harbor bigger dreams because of education. “The reason I could change myself and adapt was because my mother was educated – she was a Double MA and she used to work for the Congress at that time.”  Neena too did her MA from Delhi University and then studied at the National School of Drama. She worked in art films with Girish Karnad and Shyam Benegal but somehow the bigger roles went to Shabana Azmi and Smita Patel. Perhaps due to her personal life, she feels she got negative or smaller roles.

 

Her personal life in her 30’s and her love child with Sir Vivian Richards was the buzz of Bollywood. Neena had marched to her own drummer and in retrospect, she says,  “You are blind and in love at that time and you don’t listen even to your parents. It’s a very tough journey and I would not recommend that to others. It’s not correct and it’s tough on the child.”

The great plus point is Masaba, her daughter, with whom she has a very good relationship. Masaba is a successful designer and is also collaborating with her mother on a new venture. Says Neena: “We have a very special connection – we are almost like friends. We fight like every mother and daughter. We have a very normal kind of relationship – she’s my companion now and we go on holidays together.”

Which brings us back to Neena Gupta, who at 60, shares some pointers for other older women.  She feels women have a long way to go but it’s important for older women to feel useful: “The start has started and that is because of economic independence;   women are working and I think that’s going to bring about a change.”

She emphasizes that it’s really important for women to practice self-love and really look after themselves as they grow older. She loves “whatever she can’t eat much of – vada pao, pakore, poori aloo, missel pao and poori  chole!” To offset that, she indulges in healthy rajma chawal and walks and does yoga every day.

“No one’s ugly – everyone is beautiful,” she says. “You can sort it all out. It’s ok to be fat as long as you’re healthy. Dress up according to your body – show your best features. I have good legs so I show them! Be happy – enjoy every moment.”  She adds confidentially, “This is how I constantly talk to myself too!’

 

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My interview with the unstoppable, unflappable Neena Gupta who just turned sixty and says it’s the best time to be a woman in the film industry. At an age when actresses are supposed to pack up ther talents and fade away from youth-obsessed Bollywood, Neena Gupta is having an extended delicious Spingtime of challenging roles. Read about it in Lassi with Lavina – link in profile. #neenagupta #bollywood #indiacinema #thelastcolor #vikaskhanna #badhaiho #hindifilms

A post shared by Lavina Melwani (@lassi_with_lavina) on Nov 14, 2019 at 10:28am PST

What would she do if she was handed the gift of a free day? She says, “I love my home, I love my home food. I’ll just sit at home and cook something and watch TV series and have a drink and go to sleep early!”

What gets her through the ups and downs, and does she have a philosophy of life which takes her through rough times? Neena laughs wickedly and says, “I go shopping! I eat rubbish which I’m not supposed to eat and go see a movie and think ‘Kal to acha hoga!’ (Tomorrow will be better!)

Having gone through so many seasons of life, which is her favorite age – 20, 30 or 40s?  Perhaps the 50’s?  Joyful and always optimistic, she laughs: “Now! Now! Now is the best time of my life.”

(This article was first published in Khabar magazine in Atlanta )