Vidya Balan on 20 years of 'Parineeta': 'Saif Ali Khan was going through a divorce, we hardly spoke to each other and...'

She added, 'I think maybe that also helped the chemistry in the film. I've said a million times, and I'll say it a million times again, when I say superstar, for me, it means Sanjay Dutt.' read more
Vidya Balan has had a topsy turvy career in these nearly two decades. With Parineeta and Lage Raho Munna Bhai, she proved to be a solid and reliable performer that had the charm and the screen presence to pull the characters off. With Heyy Babyy and Kismat Konnection, she went off the rails, only resurrecting herself with the delicious Ishqiya, the rollicking The Dirty Picture, and the gripping Kahaani.
In an interview with The Indian Express, as her debut film has completed 20 years, the actress revealed, 'Saif and I didn't have any conversations on that film. We hardly spoke with each other. Also, Saif was going through some personal stuff then (divorce with Amrita Singh) so he was preoccupied between takes. It's not like we struck a friendship.'
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She added, 'I think maybe that also helped the chemistry in the film. I've said a million times, and I'll say it a million times again, when I say superstar, for me, it means Sanjay Dutt. He's just larger than life. He's just so wonderful, I absolutely love him.'
On Ishqiya
In an interview with Firstpost last year, Vidya Balan said, 'Ishqiya was the film that made me fall in love with what I was doing all over again. Until Ishqiya, I was playing a certain kind of heroine on screen and suddenly with this film, I got to play a femme fatale, something very different from what I had been doing.'
She added, 'I had gone through a low before this because I had received a lot of brickbats for the way I looked in Heyy Babyy and Kismat Konnection and all that and I thought this is not my scene. When Ishqiya happened, I just savored that. I loved working with Abhishek Chaubey and Arshad Warsi and Naseeruddin Shah. It unleashed a new facet of me as an actor.'

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