Mad About The Movies

She acts, dances, and sings, too. Shraddha Kapoor’s performances are making heads turn and cash registers ring.

- Kaveree Bamzai

SECOND GENERATION ACTORS ARE USUALLY remarkably well brought up, painstakingly polite, unfailingly correct, and super concerned about their ‘staff’, a retinue of a spot boy, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and at least one manager. They are also quite insular, untouched by the hard knocks of life outside a bubble of sprawling apartments, birthday parties with children of other stars, and American-style college independence. If Shraddha Kapoor is an exception, she hides it well. Her career graph is dotted with playing moist-eyed beauties almost always smiling in the face of tragedy, except for her second film, Luv Ka The End (2011), in which she was an 18-yearold virgin out for revenge on her rich, sleazy boyfriend. As in all Bollywood versions of ‘youthful’ films, it involved frequent use of the word fuck, short skirts, and lots of drinking, all by Kapoor. The film was vapid, but Kapoor, 27, was electric, showing a prescient ability to transcend her material.

Growing up as screen villain Shakti Kapoor’s daughter couldn’t have been easy, but she says, “From a very early age I learnt to distinguish between reality and cinema.’’ It must have helped that she wasn’t allowed to watch some of the films her father was in. Her earliest memories are of shoots in Ooty and Manali doubling as family vacations “I think my first outdoor was when I was about four. It was David uncle’s film [David Dhawan] starring Govinda.”