Sharmila Tagore

Sharmila Tagore was born on 8 December 1944 in Cawnpore (now Kanpur), United Provinces to Gitindranath Tagore, a general manager in the British India Corporation, and his wife Ira Tagore (née Barua).^[10] As a member of the aristocratic Bengali Hindu Tagore family, she is related to the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, actress Devika Rani and the painter Abanindranath Tagore. Her mother was of Assamese descent and hailed from the Barua family.^[11][12][13] Gitindranath was the grandson of the noted painter Gaganendranath Tagore, whose own father Gunendranath had been a first cousin of the laureate.^[14] In fact, Tagore is more closely related to Rabindranath Tagore through her mother: her maternal grandmother, Latika Barua (née Tagore), was the granddaughter of Rabindranath Tagore's brother, Dwijendranath Tagore. Her parents were fourth-cousins.^[14] Tagore's maternal grandfather (husband of Latika Barua née Tagore) was Jnanadabhiram Barua, an Assamese Freedom Fighter and Writer who was the First Principal of Earl Law College in Guwahati (now known as Government Law College), himself the son of the noted social worker Gunabhiram Barua.^[15][16]

Tagore was the eldest of three daughters and had two younger sisters, the late Oindrila Kunda and Romila Sen. Oindrila was the first in the family to act, and appeared in Tapan Sinha's Kabuliwala (1957) as a child.^[14][17] She later became an international bridge player.

Tagore attended St. John's Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School and Loreto Convent, Asansol.^[18] She made her film debut when she was a 13-year-old schoolgirl, after which her studies lost priority. Within a short while, her attendance and performance at school suffered, she came to be regarded as a bad influence on her classmates, and was faced with a choice of either doing films or studying further.^[19] At that point, her father advised her to move ahead in life, commit herself to a film career and 'give it her all' in order to become successful.^[19]

Tagore converted to Islam, changed her name to Begum Ayesha Sultana,^[1][62] and married Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, the titular Nawab of Pataudi and Bhopal and former captain of the Indian cricket team, on 27 December 1968.^[63][64] They had three children: Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan (b. 1970); Saba Ali Khan (b. 1976),^[65] a jewellery designer; and Soha Ali Khan (b. 1978), a Bollywood actress and TV personality. Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi died at age 70 on 22 September 2011.^[66]

From 1991 to 2004, Saif was married to actress Amrita Singh. They have two children, daughter Sara Ali Khan (b. 1995) and son Ibrahim Ali Khan (b. 2001), both actors.^[67] His second marriage is to actress Kareena Kapoor in 2012 with whom he has two sons, Taimur Ali Khan (b. 2016) and Jeh Ali Khan (b. 2021).^[68] Soha married actor Kunal Khemu in 2015, and has a daughter Inaaya Naumi Khemmu (b. 2017).^[69]

Tagore was the highest paid Indian actress in the 1970s, and is considered an accomplished Indian cinema veteran.^[70][71] Surendra Kumar of The Sunday Guardian considers her to be an actress "ahead of her time" for balancing "the serious persona of realist Bengali films, and the Bollywood persona of films with song-and-dance sequences focused on success at the box office."^[72] She has received widespread critical acclaim for her on-screen work, both nationally and internationally. During the introduction of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival screening of Aranyer Din Ratri, American filmmaker Wes Anderson recalled watching the film 25 years years ago "in a very strangely translated, blurry, scratchy, pirated DVD from a little Bollywood shop in New Jersey." He described Tagore's performance in Aranyer Din Ratri as "mysterious, cerebral, mesmerising."^[73][74]

Unlike most of her contemporaries in the 1960s, Tagore struck a convenient balance playing both glamorous and homely women on screen. She "explored roles beyond the stereotypical" in an era where women were rarely offered an opportunity to be more than "just a pretty appendage to the hero."^[73] Her wide range of complex female characters often circumvented the damsel in distress tropes, defying Indian societal norms and capturing a version of womanhood that is flawed but purposeful.^[75][76][77] According to Nandini Balial of Roger Ebert, she "redefined what an Indian woman could do in a film," and "altered the cinematic landscape for leading ladies." Balial goes on to say that Tagore's women epitomised that "being demure didn't mean being spineless, [and that] emotional devastation wasn't a death sentence."^[3] Filmfare considered her portrayal of a foul-mouthed shrew-ish sex-worker in Mausam as one of the most iconic Bollywood performances.^[78]

Bucking the Indian film industry's expectations from actresses, Tagore wore a one-piece swimsuit for her 1967 film An Evening In Paris. She was the first Bollywood actress to have done so, paving the way for Dimple Kapadia in Bobby (1973), Zeenat Aman in Qurbani (1980), and Parveen Babi in Yeh Nazdeekiyan (1982).^[79] Her 1969 Filmfare magazine cover, where Tagore poses in a two-piece bikini, was publicly labelled as "obscene" and "attention-seeking." She said her An Evening In Paris director Shakti Samanta called her after the magazine hit the stands and said,"If you want to be in the public eye, this is not the way to go." He also asked Tagore, who was in London at the time, to return to India immediately. Tagore was "really hurt" by the cover being interpreted as her trying to "be upwardly mobile" and "catch eyeballs."^{[citation needed]} In a televised interview with Karan Johar, she confirmed that "questions were asked in the [Indian] Parliament" following the controversy, and she strategically chose the wife-mother role in Aradhana as her next on-screen appearance.^[80]

With her voluminous hairdos and chiffon floral-print sarees, Tagore's sense of fashion seamlessly blended traditional elegance with modern glamour. Numerous Indian actresses have gone to emulate her retro-vintage style in recent times, including Anushka Sharma for Bombay Velvet, Preity Zinta for Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, and Deepika Padukone in Om Shanti Om.^[81][82][83] Film historian Sanjay Mukhopadhyay said that her "most significant contribution to Indian cinema is a sense of dignity and grace—after Waheeda Rehman, she was the only actress of her time who exuded this." Mukhopadhyay adds that with a "strong Tagore lineage coupled with the Pataudi gharana (family dynasty)" she was a "bourgeois star with a biography" who "occupied a cultural space beyond the reach of commoner—she could be looked at, but not possessed."^[84]

Tagore was inducted into the Bollywood Walk of Fame at Bandra Bandstand, Mumbai.^[85]