Heartbreak Talkies: Madhubala, Meena Kumari
Heartbreak Talkies: Madhubala, Meena Kumari The doomed love lives of two of Hindi cinema’s greatest stars, Madhubala and Meena Kumari The doomed love lives of two of Hindi cinema’s greatest stars, Madhubala and Meena Kumari. In the late 1930s Bombay, two men hung around the studios of the Hindi film industry, looking for a way inside. Each was accompanied by his daughter, dressed in her prettiest frock, and told to be on her most angelic behaviour. The doors opened for Ali Baksh and his five-year-old daughter Mahajabeen Bano, as they did for Ataullah Khan and nine-year-old Mumtaz Jehan. The two most beautiful actors of Hindi cinema in the Fifties and Sixties, Meena Kumari and Madhubala, whose radiance lit the desires of men across the country, began as child artistes Baby Meena and Baby Mumtaz respectively. They would go on to play the grandest stories of love and fulfillment, but had their hearts broken in real life. “To understand their choices in love later, it is...