Neena Gupta! Such a fun person, and such a fun birthday idea I had. Two fabulous Neena-y performances, we get to discuss which one is more fabulous.
Neena Gupta! She was a TV and film actress, never super famous, until her personal life made her briefly very famous. It’s an old scandal by now, but never totally forgotten. Neena got pregnant, out of wedlock, with a Cricket player, who was not Indian, and was of some mixture of African descent. The SCANDAL!!! The SHOCK!!!! The JUDGEMENT!!!! Anyway, she had a daughter, raised her daughter, her daughter is now a successful designer and good friend of Sonam Kapoor and some of the other younger film crowd.
Meanwhile, Neena has had a somewhat surprising career. She worked all along, small parts in big movies, good roles in parelal and art house films, and so on. And then in 2017 she posted on instagram asking for work. She was older, the parts had dried up, she wanted a job. It worked, resulted in 5 offers, all of which she took. And one of them was Badhai Ho, which immediately reinvigorated her career. She is playing “mother” roles now, but good mother roles, and she is playing them really well.
Now, question! If you had to pick one of these Neena’s to be the most interesting unusual strongest favorite Neena, which would it be?
Young, strongly Lesbian, super sexy, Neena flirting with Madhuri?
Or older Neena, spontaneously deciding to have bondage sex with her husband Jackie Shroff?
dontcallitbollywood 
I adore Neena, she’s such a badass and a great actor. I am enthusiastically voting for older Neena sexing Jackie because that’s the unique thing she’s bringing to the screen as an older woman, someone who looks and behaves her age and is also sexy and interested in sex even though she’s been married for decades. That’s something you don’t see enough of on screen in any industry, Indian or American or anywhere else. She’s not a cougar, she’s not a joke but she wants some and gets it on the regular.
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PS my husband gets a dreamy look in his eyes whenever I play Choli Ke Peeche 😆
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Neena and Madhuri, they are HOT together!
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I think the important part there is the looking and behaving her age! When we get a happy older married couple moment in films, it is usually a prettied up youngified version. Maybe a 50 year old actress, but one with professional hair and make-up, and moving like a glamorous 50 year old actress. Neena plays it different, she shuffles in slippers, and has futzy make-up that is sometimes smeared a little, she’s an average older woman who isn’t trying to look like a glamour doll. And she has an active sex life.
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Much as I like strong lesbian Neena, I think there could be more flirting, and that sex movie with Jackie is really delightful. The answer, of course, is a sex movie with Madhuri.
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HA!
And you know, it’s not too late, they are both still working. Did you read the comments on my Mona Lisa Smile post? It’s a girl’s college students and their problems movie, but I wrote up a framework where the Headmistress has a big fight with her partner, the school nurse, who quits and leaves her over the conservative direction she has allowed the school to go in. And then the headmistress returns to teaching, inspires her students to rebel, the whole movie happens, and at the end the school nurse returns, having been convinced of her love and that she has changed by her actions in mentoring the students. Anyway, this would be a good Neena-Madhuri casting, wouldn’t it? I could see either one as the headmistress or the nurse, a couple together since the 90s (we can use Khalnayak stills to fill in their early years) who have a big fight that endangers their relationship, and then reunite after big romantic deeds and a sad longing separation.
On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 2:25 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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It would be! I’ve never seen that movie but it sounds great. They’re a great couple, with good chemistry, I think.
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My God, Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai? It used to be a famous song for obvious reasons. Completely forgotten about it until you put in your blog now. Ha ha
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I was on a Manisha Koirala songs mood and suddenly found this, which is more Neena’s song than anything. Sexy, wise and beautiful Neena.
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Oh, that’s lovely!
On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 3:52 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Viv Richards was not just any cricket player, he was probably the most famous (and best) cricketer at the time. He was the captain of the West Indies team at a time when West Indies was considered one of the strongest teams in the world. Even now, plenty of people rate him as one of the top 5 cricketers ever and pretty much everyone would agree that he is easily among the top 10. And he was immensely popular off the field as well. I am talking LeBron James levels of talent and popularity but in every cricket playing nation. Neena herself was not a huge star, but she was still fairly well known as an actress and well respected for her work in parallel cinema. I think it is difficult to imagine how big a deal Neena’s pregnancy was at the time if you were not there. Not only was she having a child with the world’s most famous cricketer in a country that was crazy about cricket, she was doing it out of wedlock and was completely unapologetic about it. You are probably going to laugh about it, but until this whole story became big news, I had never even realized that it was possible to have a child without marriage. I literally thought it was biologically impossible. To be fair, I was probably 8 or 9 at the time in a country where sex was very hush hush, but still… So yes, I hold Neena personally responsible for teaching me a major life lesson. Who knows how many other Indian kids had the same realization as me at the time. Plus, her refusal to be ashamed about it, turned her into kind of a feminist hero. I distinctly remember my very middle class, small town Indian mom and her friends talking about it all with grudging admiration for the courage Neena Gupta had.
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Thank you! That really helps me understand it. I knew it was a big story, but couldn’t quite see why, since Neena wasn’t super famous. I guess just having a child outside of marriage in the public eye at all was enough to be a Thing.
Smita had her son around the same time, yes? But I think with that one Raj Babbar made a faint towards a “second wife” kind of deal, it wasn’t quite as clear as Neena being a 100% single mother.
On Mon, Jul 6, 2020 at 6:50 AM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Smita’s pregnancy was a couple years earlier. Like you said, the nod towards her being a second “wife” was enough to quiet things down a bit. Even her Wikipedia page lists her as being married to Raj Babbar. Then she died during childbirth and the whole story took a completely different turn. Neena was very different because she was doing it all alone. Viv Richards openly accepted that he was the father but other than that, it was always Neena who answered all the questions. There was no story of star crossed lovers with a grand romance or anything of the sort. She was always upfront that she had no intention of marrying him and of course she was going to raise the child alone – and she did! From a few interviews here and there, it seems like she was pretty much a single mother. Masaba does have a relationship with her father and he was there at her wedding, but it seems much more like the kind of relationship you would have with an uncle rather than a father.
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