‘Om Shanti Om wasn’t a quintessential debut film’

Deepika Padukone has come a long way in Bollywood and credits her mother for being an inspiration

MUMBAI: Deepika Padukone, the actor who has given hits like Happy New Year and Cocktail, says she has experienced different phases in her career.”Om Shanti Om wasn’t a quintessential debut film. I played a double role in the film. One was classic and the other one contemporary. I like to do films with challenging roles. I know I’ve made mistakes, but I am proud of those films as they taught me something”.

I don’t come from a film background and I didn’t even know how to deliver dialogues, so it has been a learning experience,” said the Piku star.

Deepika, who was last seen as a caring and selfless daughter in this year’s hit movie Piku, says it’s her mother who keeps the family together and inspires her. She is the daughter of former badminton ace Prakash Padukone and has a sister who is a golf player, but it’s her mother that she looks up to the most.

“We all inspire each other in different ways, but it’s my mother who inspires me the most. She is the backbone of our family. My father is a celebrity and my sister started her golf career, but my mother was never in the spotlight,” said Deepika.

“She is happy taking a backseat. My mother is the real hero in my family,” she told reporters after being felicitated with Woman of the Year award at the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) Weekend and Awards here on Sunday.

Deepika, who joins Anurag Kashyap, Farhan Akhtar and Karan Johar in the board of trustees of the Mumbai Academy of the Moving Image (MAMI) film festival, said it was a “wonderful space” to discover fresh talent.

The MAMI film festival had last year faced a lot of hurdles to gather funds. Many prominent personalities had donated substantial amounts for staging the event.

After appointing a new chairperson in Kiran Rao, as well as film critic Anupam Chopra, to infuse life into the festival, it is ready with a new board of trustees that also includes Riteish Deshmukh and Siddharth Roy Kapoor.

“MAMI is India’s leading film festival and I am proud to be part of this festival. It’s a wonderful space to discover and nurture fresh talent, build audiences and interact with other talent from across the world,” Deepika said. The festival showcases latest cutting-edge independent cinema, art house fare alongside Bollywood, Hollywood and cult international movies.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 14^th, 2015.

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