Urmila Matondkar’s 5 Finest Performances

In a career spanning 30 years Urmila  has played  everything from a killer  to a stalker to a rape survivor.It’s easy to be bedazzled by her glamour  and oomph. But beneath these there is an actor who understands the craft.

1.     Rangeela(1980): She came, she sang, she danced  .She  conquered… Urmila tripping over that handcart to the sound  of  Asha Bhosle’s Ho ja rangeela re oozed oomph and sex appeal. With considerable  help from Manish Malhotra,  Urmila redefined the  seductive space  which was so far occupied  by Hindi film heroines with simpering reluctance. After Zeenat Aman,Urmila  was  the first Bollywood diva to break away from the belief that only bad girls  wore  short  skirts.

2.     Pinjar(2003): A change of  image for  the femme fatale, as she  transformed  into a rural Punjabi woman during Partition who accepts her rapist as her husband. It  was a tough role requiring grueling levels of  focus  and dedication. Director Chandraprakash Diwedi  was  filming  Amrita Pritam, and that is  a  big deal. Urmila  was up to the challenge.

3.     Pyar Tune  Kya Kiya(2001): Arrey Ramu, tune  kya kiya! Ram Gopal Varma once again turned his  muse to a wickedly subverted  ode to womanhood.  If  in Rangeela Urmila played  a sexually innocent  seductress(Urmila  oomphed  only in  dream sequences)  in this film she lusted after Fardeen  Khan like Sharon Stone on coke. It was  frighteningly desperate  performance filled with  rage and longing that went  beyond the mediocre  direction(by the late Rajat Mukerjee). Her expressions of  yearning and aggression in the song Rondhe  hai tera pyaar(Alisha Chiani smouldering up the soundtrack) were  killing.

4.     Ek Haseena Thi(2004): Hell hath no  fury like  a woman scorned. Who knows this better than Saif Ali Khan? He  was left by Urmila to be eaten  by live rats at  the end  Sriram Raghavan stunning revenge  saga. From the innocent virgin seduced  by the cunning Casanova to the psychopathic  avenger, what a range  Urmila  revealed! To think they  didn’t give her  the best actress award for this.They didn’t give  Mumtaz the  award for Tere Mera Sapne either.

5.     Kaun:  I still get shivers when I recall Urmila’s  psychotic  expression at the  end as she peeps  out of her home’s eyehole to catch her next victim. This was a film that required her to ‘act’ like  a  normal frightened  victim  all through when in  fact she  was  a frigging lunatic killing people  who had the misfortune of  knocking on her oak door.Among  all  the films that Ram Gopal Varma  directed with Urmila this was the scariest. And for  the right reasons. After  Urmila stopped working with  him Ramu’s films got scary for all the wrong reasons.