Jayalalitha, Heroine To Chief Minister

Film industry and politics are interlinked in this part of South India because enormous stardom gained in films is finally tested on political field from the times of MGR and NTR. In this indescribable grief situation with the loss of Jayalalitha, it is worth to remind few memories about her non-political career.

Jayalalitha was born in Karnataka in an orthodox Tamil Iyengar family. Jayaram comes as a prefix to Jayalalitha’s name belongs to her father Jayaram and mother is Vedavalli, whose onscreen name is Sandhya. After the death of father at the age of 2, both Vedavalli and Jayalalitha returned to Bengaluru. Later, Sandhya started trials in Tamil cinema to grow as an artist. Being from an artistic family, Jayalalitha learnt Bharat Natyam when she was just 3.

As Sandhya grew busy in films, she used to reside in Madras while Jayalalitha is kept at grandparents in Bengaluru. During these days, Jayalalitha used to miss mother’s company at the very tender age. Then, Sandhya forced Jayalalitha to join Tamil films at small age of 15 years.

Most interestingly, her first movie ‘Vennira Aadai’ was A rated film where she played a young widow. Irony is, Jayalalitha could not watch this movie in theaters because she was not an adult. A girl who topped Matriculate exam is forcibly made to take filmy profession.

There after Jayalalitha never looked back. She wore sleeveless blouses oozing glamour and also drenched under waterfalls shooting the romantic scenes. 

Jayalalitha had childhood crush on cricketer Nari Contractor, actors Shammi Kapoor and Shoban Babu during those days. She loved Shoban Babu but could not marry him. 

As film career faded out and relationships never worked, Jayalalitha went into depression and tried attempting a suicide. That’s when Marudhur Gopalan Ramachandran, popularly known as MGR saved her and introduced her into politics. 

Jayalalitha is a prolific writer and reader of English, Tamil books. She was a regular writer in the yesteryear Tamil weekly by name Thai. 

In Hindi, her only one film ‘Izzat’ besides Dharmendra was also a hit.