SHE ENTERED FILMS WHEN IT WAS CONSIDERED IMMORAL FOR WOMEN TO COME IN FRONT OF A MOTION PICTURE CAMERA.
Patience Cooper, an Anglo-indian from Calcutta, became the first popular film star in India. Her achievement is all the more incredible as she entered films at a time when it was considered highly immoral for women to come in front of a motion picture camera. Little wonder that Dadasaheb Phalke had to cast a man, Anna Salunke, as his heroine in India’s first ever feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913).
Said to be born around 1905, Cooper, with her sharp features and fair skin, was comparable to the Hollywood beauties of the time.
In her films, she often played a sexuallytroubled woman caught at the centre of moral dilemmas, whose life ended in tragedy. Beginning with silent films, Cooper made the transition to the talkies with comparative ease. Incidentally, she also enacted what are regarded to be the first-ever dual roles by an actress in Indian cinema – playing two sisters in Patni Pratap (1923) and a mother and a daughter in Kashmiri Sundari (1925). Though she acted till well into the 1940s, Cooper migrated to Pakistan along with tea-estate owner MAH Isaphani and died in Karachi in 1993.
After he was unable to find a woman to play the female lead in his first film, Dadasaheb Phalke finally convinced two women – the mother-daughter duo of Durgabai Kamat and Kamlabai Gokhale – to face the camera in his follow-up film and another mythological, Mohini Bhasmasur (1913). Durgabai had separated from her husband and along with her little daughter, Kamlabai, had joined a travelling theatre company when they crossed paths with Phalke.
In an interview, Kamlabai recalled staying at Phalke’s house in Nasik, waking up daily at 4am and travelling to reach the location – three hours away – by bullock cart. Durgabai can also be said to be the head of Indian cinema’s first acting family as daughter Kamlabai, grandson Chandrakant Gokhale and great-grandson Vikram Gokhale all became fine actors in their own right.
Zubeida, and sisters Sultana and Shehzadi, were all actresses in the silent era while their mother, Fatma Begum, an actress herself, is regarded as the first-ever Indian woman director. Zubeida went on to become the first heroine of the talkies in Indian filmdom.
KB Sundarambal, a famous vocalist and theatre performer, was paid a whopping ₹1,00,000, the first Indian actor or actress to receive such a sum, to star in the Tamil film, Bhakta Nandanar (1935). It is said Sundarambal had given up performing on the stage following the death of her husband, and in order to put off textile magnate Hassandas, the prospective producer of the film, quoted a then unheard-of amount, only to have him agree!