Following the drama in the newspapers—two actresses, who were till recently, darlings of the industry, are now with their backs to the wall. Bright, young and sorted, they ought to have known better than to put their hands into the hornet’s nest that the industry is. Male hornets too.
This movie industry—no different from the rest of the world in this matter—worships success and power, and power is wrested by the men. Movie history is full of instances of female talent being crushed because of the displeasure of the male order.
Deepika Padukone has got herself into trouble by walking out of Race 2, and has taken on the might of not just the producers, but also her actor colleagues, who, it seems, snubbed her at parties. It’s not as if nobody has walked out a film before, or not returned the signing amount; it is unprofessional to do that, whether the ditcher is a male or female, but the nastiness doesn’t hit the roof when a male star dumps a film.
The sadder case is that of Priyanka Chopra, who is among the top actresses and was, till recently, feted, awarded and admired—everyone’s favourite “Piggy Chops”. Suddenly, stories doing the media rounds say that her career is on the downswing, because she rubbed the Khan lobby the wrong way. Two Khans at least, the third lives in his own universe.
Reportedly, her closeness to Shah Rukh Khan angered the SRK camp, which means she can’t work with him; his actor friends won’t act with her and his filmmaker friends won’t cast her in their films. If this is true, then almost overnight, she has slid down from A-list to no-list status. At the Berlin Festival, where Don 2 was screened, she was allegedly snubbed by the rest of the team and not even invited to the Agneepath success party.
It has happened before when the camps have closed ranks against the over ambitious outsider who, in their eyes, got too big for her boots. If there is really an affair, as the grapevine whispers, then there is a man involved too, but the woman invariably bears the brunt of it. Of course, the question also is, why would a woman get herself into such a mess after clawing her way to the top through sheer hard word? The other unasked question is if any powerful star asks (demands?) can an actress say no, and survive?
It is any surprise that so many actresses, aware of their short career spans, make money any which way they can—ads, endorsements, item numbers, dancing at events—and then quietly fade away when the top actors want younger actresses opposite them.