Smita Patil
1955–1986
Smita Patil was a television newsreader in Marathi when Shyam Benegal cast her, and in eleven years she made something close to eighty films in a register nobody else was working in - Bhumika, Manthan, Mirch Masala, Chakra. She won the National Award twice.
She worked in commercial cinema too, which the parallel-cinema world held against her and which she defended as the thing that paid for the rest. Namak Halaal is from that side of the ledger. She died at thirty-one, days after her son was born, and the loss is still described in the industry as the one it never made up.
