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Sharmila Tagore on Stardom Today and Wanting to Play a 'Villainous' Character Next: 'Villains, Too, Sometimes Have Much To Say...'
Sharmila Tagore’s return to screen reveals a legend still restless, observant, and deeply engaged with cinema.
On a balmy summer afternoon, Sharmila Tagore meets The Hollywood Reporter India at her South Delhi home tucked away quietly into a canopied lane of the city. In her living room, she sits poised and pacific, waiting for the interview to begin. This is where the actor likes spending most of her time, she says. “I love living alone. I am very comfortable spending time looking after the home, or doing nothing at all,” says the octogenarian who was on a 13-year-long hiatus — with her last screen outing being Danish Aslam’s Break Ke Baad in 2010 — before making her OTT debut with the widely appreciated film, Gulmohar, in 2023.
Back From Hiatus
“In 2011, after Tiger (husband and cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi) passed away, there was so much on my plate that films were the last thing on my list of priorities. Also, nothing good was working out and I wasn’t getting very many offers, until Rahul Chittella (director of Gulmohar) came to me,” says Tagore. The yes, however, wasn’t instantaneous. She mulled over it until the script grew on her, and she settled into the story where she is the matriarch of a joint family about to embark on a collective reckoning at the behest of vacating their ancestral home.
Through the span of the 100-plus films she’s done — debuting at the age of 14 in Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar (1959) — Tagore, in her 80th year, is at a curious juncture where new leaps of faith are colliding with reprises of her past. Not only did the iconic Nayak (1966) by Ray and Aradhana (1969) by Shakti Samanta re-release in theatres in February this year, but they were also followed by her return to Bengali films with Suman Ghosh’s Puratawn. “Everyone is saying I am coming back to Bengali cinema after 14 years, but I haven’t kept count of the years,” Tagore says, more to herself.
Modern Talking
In May this year, the actor travelled to Cannes for the film festival, where her restored 1970 classic Aranyer Din Ratri by Ray was screened to a packed theatre. “It was so wonderful to watch that film in this day and age. It made me realise how contemporary it really is, dealing in subjects like fragile masculinity, yet being rooted in an Indian context,” she says. In that regard, Tagore wonders aloud what happened to the “Indianness” of stories in Hindi cinema. “I hear films released in theatres aren’t doing well. I’m not a film scholar so I don’t know the actual reasons, really, but maybe it’s because of the lack of relatability in the content,” she says.
Tagore harks back to Aradhana — the story of an estranged mother and child who find their way back to each other despite the odds — having done well back in the day across linguistic divides because of the “universality in its emotions.” “I found that in Laapataa Ladies too. Despite how diverse we are as a country, whether it’s in the way we think or the way we speak, there are things in common. Even when we were doing aspirational films like An Evening in Paris, the core was always Indian. I think we have moved very far away from that,” Tagore says.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a dearth of talent. “In fact, so many of them come trained now. Back in the day, we could get away with hamming,” she says with a laugh. Through the course of the conversation, one also realises how the actor spends her days watching, learning, even studying the world around her — keeping herself up to speed with the unrelenting universe of content on screens. As a result, Tagore has a keen eye for spotting talent, mentioning Sparsh Shrivastava of Jamtara (2020-2022) and Laapataa Ladies fame, who was also seen alongside her granddaughter Sara Ali Khan last year in Ae Watan Mere Watan, a period drama. “In this one scene, Sparsh is in the background, doing nothing but intently listening to the speaker. However, my eyes immediately get drawn towards him,” she says. “That’s the mark of a wonderful, spontaneous actor. I think he has great potential.” She talks about enjoying most of what Sanya Malhotra does, and was also excited by films like Maidaan (2024) and Laapataa Ladies, because of the number of new talents they platformed.
But more importantly, Tagore wonders if the trappings of stardom are now handicapping the craft and the industry itself. “Back in the day, movies of stars like Dilip Kumar ji, Waheeda (Rahman) ji, would run to packed theatres for a time. People knew Dev Anand’s films would have good music. Or let’s put it this way — they always fulfilled the expectations people had from them, and they recovered the money spent on their films. I believe that’s not the case anymore. Am I right?” she inquires almost rhetorically. But now, the vanity of the stars travel before their work does — quite literally so — even in Tagore’s experience.
The storied Pataudi Palace standing a stone’s throw away from Gurugram in Haryana is often rented out for shoots. In the last decade or so, it’s not been unusual to receive requests for multiple rooms that can host very many people in the entourage of actors. “Inadvertently, I know about all of this because we rent out Pataudi (Palace). There’ll be a secretary, a cook, a masseuse. So, that’s six to seven people right there and that must be costing a lot to producers,” she says. Same for the vanity vans. “I hear there are now make-up rooms, sitting rooms, sleeping rooms and discussion rooms. The bigger the size of the vanity, the bigger the status of the star, apparently,” Tagore says, almost mischievously.
The Question of Language
Amidst this conundrum of what might draw audiences back to the theatres, the artiste asks a pressing question. “Why is there so much dialogue in English?” So much so, that Hindi film scripts are now — more often than not — handed over in the Roman script. “It all comes back to the writing. The likes of Anurag Kashyap, Tigmanshu Dhulia and all are very good, and then, of course, there was Gulzaar saab. You’d find so much joy in just saying the lines they wrote. I like speaking in English, because being a Bengali my Hindi is not very good, but I don’t want to act in English,” she says. Tagore believes she expresses herself better in Hindi and Bengali because her emotions “tally with those languages.” With English, the rhythm changes entirely. It’s what she misses about the medium in this language, where astronomical amounts are being spent on stories that sometimes don’t even speak the same tongue as the people watching them — and that immediately shifts the emotional landscapes and contexts.
Tagore draws a comparison with Bengali and South Indian films, pointing to the fact that they are often made on smaller budgets and tighter schedules, sometimes as little as 14 days. “So, they are mostly able to recover the money they spend making these films,” she explains, adding that maybe the death of single screens at the hands of multiplexes has also impacted “viewing pleasure.” “Today, one goes to multiplexes, puts their feet up while having popcorn, as opposed to single screens where people from all strata of society would come together to experience a movie,” the actor says, wondering if that too has contributed to the prevailing crisis.
Progress and Contradictions
When asked if she thinks women — especially older women — are written better today owing to the advent and the seeming democracy of the streaming space, Tagore pauses for several moments. Her answer comes in layers.
She first tackles the question on how women, in general, are portrayed on screen today, saying that films like Crew (2024), a heist film with three women in the lead; a character like Piku — or several ones played by Kangana Ranaut — back in the day, would be unimaginable. “People didn’t like a strong, independent woman. They wanted to sympathise with her. So, if Pushpa from Amar Prem became a successful singer, the film wouldn’t have succeeded,” she says.
This, however, doesn’t mean that women have been accepted in their entirety by society, as Tagore observes how filmmakers and writers almost apologise for showing an emancipated woman. “In Kahaani — which is such a wonderful film — the director made the heroine the perpetrator, who killed a man, go back to her mentor and say that the only time she truly felt like a woman was when she was pregnant. It tries to underline the feminine aspect of her identity, and then, Amitabh Bachchan’s voice, during the Durga visarjan, says that every now and then, someone descends on earth to achieve something like this — all of it, only to justify that even if she has killed, she is still a woman. Because the audience won’t accept a women if she has transgressed, and she has to apologise for it.”
In this moment — half amused and half exasperated — Tagore recounts watching a scene from a show on television, where a man who is abusive towards his wife, has a sudden change of heart, and decides to apologise to her. “She is, for some reason, holding his slippers in her hands, and as he approaches to apologise to her, she says, ‘Aap mujhse maafi maangkar mera paap ka bojh aur matt badha dena (Don’t ask me to forgive you and increase the burden of my sins),’” she says, before breaking into a laugh and adding, “I felt like throwing my shoes at the television!”
Second Act
The actor moves on to the rich inner worlds of elderly characters and how untapped they remain. She wonders if it’s a dearth of understanding between generations. “Maybe a young person doesn’t really understand the ageing process because they haven’t gone through it? The writer perhaps doesn’t have an elderly person in their life, or even if they do, they are being polite to them, looking out for them, but aren’t really engaging with them because so much of the times, old people are absent, and this absence invisibilises them,” Tagore says. Then perhaps someone who has spent time with or thinking about an elderly person in their lives could do a better job of bringing to life such a character. Which also means that elderly people — especially women — find it that much more difficult to be protagonists of stories. “Unless, of course, say in the West, someone may want to do a film with an Anthony Hopkins, and they write a film keeping him in mind. This can only happen when you are actively thinking about or have a connection with an elderly person in your life, because otherwise, you’re caught up with your own life and your peers who are around your age, and you write from those experiences,” she says.
How, then, does the actor feel inspired to choose projects today, and how does she inhabit the characters? By tapping into memory, picking up cues from her surroundings, and just about anything that catches her attention. “When I am visualising my character or reading a particular scene, I might be thinking of my grandmother, or some other old person, and how they would walk, or say or do something. For instance, in Puratawn, when I tell my co-actor to feed her first, they say that that’s my own reflection I am talking about.” Her character of Mrs. Sen — struck by Alzheimer’s disease — is seen whispering as she asks her reflection to be fed first — a bit that she improvised on herself without the director’s intervention. “I don’t overprepare because I like to build on my character, and so much of that happens when you’re in the make-up chair, and then on set when you see where the props are placed and what the space looks like. You absorb and engage with the space, and then the camera angle too. I can’t quite explain because it’s a very instinctive process,” Tagore explains.
What does she really want at this point in her life — in her seventh decade in the films? “To play a villainous character, perhaps? After having played the ‘goody-goody’ ones all my life, that would be fun. Villains, too, sometimes have much to say, you know,” Tagore signs off, making a mental note about asking her young cinema scholar friends to help her get her hands on films with bad women at their heart.
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