Sitara Devi

Kathak dancer, and a guest artist here (1920-2014)

Sitara Devi was one of the great kathak dancers of the century - Tagore is said to have called her Nritya Samragni, the empress of dance - and she appears in this film as a guest artist. She danced in Hindi films from the 1930s while keeping a concert career, and refused the Padma Bhushan in 2002 on the grounds that it was too small an honour for what she had done. She died in Mumbai in 2014.