Multi-lingual actress Sridevi (born Shree Amma Yanger Ayyapan) passed away in Dubai on Saturday night due to a cardiac arrest.
She was 54, and is survived by husband and filmmaker Boney Kapoor, and daughters Jhanvi Kapoor and Khushi Kapoor.
The actress was reportedly perfectly all right until she suddenly collapsed and passed away before she could be taken to a hospital. Several videos of her taken at the wedding of a nephew that she had gone to attend in Dubai show her completely normal. Her brother-in-law Sanjay Kapoor had said that she had no history of heart disease, and that she was in her hotel room when the arrest happened.
The body of the diva is being brought back to Mumbai today by a private flight.
Sridevi was born on August 13, 1963, in Sivakasi in Tamil Nadu to Tamil father Ayyapan and Telugu mother Rajeswari. Her mother was from Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh and her father Ayyappan was a lawyer in Tamil Nadu. She has a sister and two step-brothers.
The actress starred in over 250 films, including 80+ Telugu films, 70+ Tamil films and 70+ Hindi films, as also Malayalam and Kannada films. After finding enormous success in Bollywood, she rose to become India's biggest female star, a position she held in the 1980s and 1990s. She also won five Filmfare Best Actress awards. She went on a long hiatus from 1996 after getting married to Boney Kapoor, a film producer, who is also the elder brother of actors Anil Kapoor and Sanjay Kapoor, and made a movie only in 2012 after that,
English Vinglish. She next starred in a Tamil film
Puli, and another Hindi film
Mom.
Sridevi was a leading actress in Telugu films for two decades, acting with all the leading stars and directors. In her maiden Telugu film Badipantulu she acted as the legendary NTR's granddaughter and received applause for her performance. She subsequently grew to a leading heroine and paired up with same NTR later as his heroine and again won hearts despite being almost 40 years younger than him. She also acted alongside ANR, Krishna, Sobhan Babu, Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna and Venkatesh. Veteran director K Raghavendra Rao directed Sridevi in as many as 26 films.
In 2013, the Government of India awarded Sridevi the Padma Sri, the country's fourth highest civilian honor. She was also voted "India's Greatest Actress in 100 Years" in a CNN-IBN national poll conducted in 2013 on the occasion of the centenary of Indian cinema.