Urvashi Rautela set to star as Parveen Babi in biopic on Bollywood star’s tumultuous life

Just days after attending the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival, Urvashi Rautela took to Instagram to announce her latest acting role in which she will embody the persona of Parveen Babi—the bombshell star of the 70s and 80s—in a biopic.

Rautela’s Instagram post was a short reel showing a film script titled Parveen Babi and written in Hindi. The snapshot of the script showed that the film will be directed by Wasim S Khan in accordance with the words of the film’s writer Dhiraj Mishra. The former pageant queen, and now model-turned-actor captioned the post “Bollywood failed Parveen Babi but I will make you proud.”

Previous depictions

The biopic starring Urvashi Rautela is expected to be the first, true-to-life retelling of Parveen Babi’s life and short stint as a superstar in Bollywood. Previous semi-autobiographical depictions of the deceased actor’s life can be found in Bhatt’s films Arth (1982) and Woh Lamhe (2006) — two films written and produced by Bhatt, which touch upon a very brief time in her life of when she was in a relationship with the renowned director.

Babi’s rise to fame and eventual downfall

Despite decades having gone by since she ruled the Bollywood silver screen, Parveen Babi is still hailed as an icon. According to her IMDb page, she starred in a total of 67 films in spite of her relatively short-lived acting career. Her rise to fame was marked by blockbuster hits like Amar Akbar Anthony, Namak Halaal, Deewar, and Shaan to name a few. In addition to her acting credentials, what further added to her star power was her appearance on the cover of TIME Magazine in 1976 at a time when no other Bollywood personality had graced the cover of the prestigious publication.

Her rise to fame and continued presence in the spotlight was as much due to her success on the big screen as it was because of the paparazzi and Indian public’s interest in her personal life and gradual downward spiral. Her widely known affairs with director Mahesh Bhatt, actors Kabir Bedi and Danny Denzongpa often kept her in the headlines.
Babi’s descent from fame began with her increasingly deteriorating mental health and eventual diagnosis of suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Towards the end of her life, she had stopped appearing in films or in public and was eventually found dead alone in her home at the age of 56. The former Bollywood glamour girl’s life is now viewed as a tragic case study in how Bollywood as a community has failed multiple times in supporting and providing help to its stars.

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