Dilip Kumar believed that “she was the finest actress of her generation.” Nalini Jaywant (18 February 1926 – 20 December 2010), a cousin of Shobhana Samarth (which makes her Nutan and Tanuja’s aunt), started her film career with Radhika (1941) at the age of 14. She appeared in Mehboob Khan’s Bahen (1941), a film about a brother’s obsessive love for his sister.
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Willum Skeener
She performed in a few more movies before finding succsees in Anokha Pyar (1948). In 1950, she garnered fame when she became a top star with her performances opposite Ashok Kumar in Samadhi and Sangram. She and Kumar further collaborated on films such as Jalpari (1952), Kafila (1952), Nau Bahar (1952), Saloni (1952), Lakeeren (1954), Naaz (1954), Mr. X (1957), Sheroo (1957) and Toofan Mein Pyar Kahan (1963).
In 1953, Nalini delivered two absolutely stunning performances, in the Dev Anand starrer Rahee and in the Dilip Kumar film Shikast. In K.A. Abbas’s Rahee, Nalini played an upright tea plantation worker who reforms hero Dev Anand. Her posthumous Ek pal ruk jaana refrain haunts long after the film is over.
In Shikast, Nalini vividly etched out the pain and passion, the helplessness and the desire to hurt inherent in her ill-fated relationship with her village love, Dilip Kumar.
Jaywant remained an important leading actress through the mid-1950s, appearing in such films as Railway Platform (1955), Nastik (1954), Munimji (1955), and Hum Sab Chor Hain (1956).
The 1958 film Kala Pani, directed by Raj Khosla, was Jaywant’s last successful movie, for which she won the Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award. Bombay Race Course (1965) was the last film she made before retirement
Having played the heroine for two decades with a paucity of good roles, Nalini retired soon thereafter.
Almost 20 years later, Nalini sprang a surprise when she agreed to play her only character role, that of Amitabh Bachchan’s blind, long-suffering mother in Nastik (1983).
On December 20, 2010, Nalini Jayawant died alone and forgotten in a small bungalow in Mumbai’s Chembur suburb, where she had lived in seclusion for more than two decades. When a municipal ambulance summoned by neighbours on December 22 arrived, she was dead for 3 days. Later, someone claiming to be a distant relative had her cremated. She was 84 years old.
