Dimple Kapadia said if you call me ‘aunty', I will quit Dil Chahta Hai, recalls Farhan Akhtar: ‘It might look rude if I called her…'
When Farhan Akhtar was making his first film Dil Chahta Hai, he had managed to rope in a mix of the most popular and talented actors of that time. Aside from casting Aamir Khan, Akshaye Khanna and Saif Ali Khan, Farhan managed to bring in veteran actor Dimple Kapadia in one of the most significant roles in the film. Since Dimple was 16 years older than Farhan, and had a lot of seniority over him in terms of their career in the movies, Farhan couldn't decide how to address her, and this confusion went on even after they started shooting.
In a chat at the Waves Summt 2025, Farhan said that he found it odd to address her by her name as that might look rude, but at the same time, he knew that calling her 'Dimple aunty' would upset her, so he was caught in a fix. 'When Dimple arrived on the set… So I had spoken to her, I had cast her in the film but the one thing I had not done was that I had not called her anything because I can't call her Dimple aunty, she would get very upset and I can't call her Dimple because I thought she might feel that I am being too rude so I would just say 'ji ji, yes yes, okay okay, yes ma'am',' he recalled.
Farhan shared that after a couple of days, Dimple started to notice this and asked him why he wasn't addressing her properly. 'When we working also, we started work and if I had to call her, I couldn't say 'call Dimple', so I would say 'are you ready ma'am? Please come.' So after 2-3 days, she asked, 'why are you not calling me by my name?' I said, 'I don't know what to call you'. She said, 'you better call me Dimple. if Dimple aunty comes out of your mouth, I am leaving this film,' he shared with a laugh and called her an 'amazing person to work with.'
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In 2021, on the 20th anniversary of the film, Farhan shared a special note for his cast and crew members on social media. Here, he shared that he would have scrapped the film if Dimple refused to be a part of it. 'I think if you had said no, I'd probably have had to scrap making the film. Tara was written for you and thank my lucky stars that you said yes. Forever grateful,' he shared on X.
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But that was the time when, in the wake of Bobby's success, incredibly lucrative offers were coming her way, one of them being to play the leading role for the movie great Manmohan Desai."They were offering me Rs 5 lakh for a film in those days," she says. If true, it was decidedly the highest rate in the industry at that time paid to women artistes and only marginally less than the fees Dimple reportedly commands now—Rs 6 lakh."I was too young to realise the importance of Bobby for my career, but from the day I entered Rajesh's house, Ashirwad, I somehow knew that the marriage wouldn't work." Life at the oddly spacious Bandra bungalow, overlooking the sea, was full of experiences that seem like harrowing nightmares to Dimple now. 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It was a pathetic sight when Rajesh waited at the end of the week for collection figures but the people didn't have the guts to come and tell him."There was an upheaval in the house every day, and almost every night battle scenes were being enacted. After their separation, the film press in Bombay even reported acts of gross sadism, such as Dimple being subjected to cigarette burns and whipping. No one denied the reports."I left the house thrice earlier, but every time I went back home I felt sorry about the whole thing and came back. Both Rajesh and I were unable to accept the failure of our marriage. But I realised I wouldn't survive as a human being if I lived there any longer. I got totally neurotic because I was prepared to do go to any extreme ...only in order to extract a smile from him."The most widely publicised marriage of the early '70s between Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia thus virtually came to an end when, one day in April 1982, Dimple, accompanied by her two daughters, Twinkle and Pinkie, then aged eight years and five years respectively, arrived in her parents' home, determined not to go back this time. Dimple was at last prepared to put up a fight. She had already negotiated with Sippy for the role in Saagar, paving the way for her Rajesh and Dimple are still fighting in court over virtually every issue: the custody of the children, alimony, share of property, share of investments, "for a share of even the most insignificant thing that we ever possessed between ourselves."Dimple admits of having an involvement with another person during the period that her marriage with Rajesh had lasted. "It was a selfish involvement. I was experimenting with myself. I had to. I wanted to find out what was wrong with me as a woman." She puts up a brave front, but the separation must have left her a very insecure person. And she never got over her sense of guilt for having been the cause for her family's being cast off by her grandfather, and then the humiliating raids complete with metal detectors and sniffer dogs. Chunibhai reportedly became a changed man afterwards, withdrawn into a shell, and shy of company. "I was the favourite child," Dimple chokingly says, "and everything went wrong in my life."Saagar, Lava, Patal Bhairvai, Arjun, Manzil—Dimple has been deluged with work ever since her return to films. And, in the three years, she and Rajesh have done their best to make sure that they don't have to run into each other. It is only early this year, during the dubbing of Lava, that they met on the staircase of the dubbing studio. "He looked pale and thin. I invited him for a cup of tea and he said he'd come. But 15 minutes later, when I enquired, I was told that he was gone."However, Dimple is not nostalgic but regretful for having taken so much in her stride, "having suffered at the hand of blind emotion, and inertia". But the gap of 10 long years has landed her up in the new realities of the film industry which has only lately emerged out of a long period of absolute male domination and is again on the lookout for faces, lovely feminine faces, well-scrubbed and glamorous, which can set the wheels of moviedom in motion all over Kapoor, Dimple's co-actor in Janbaaz, reveried: "She is the most beautiful woman on screen since Madhubala." That may or may not be true, with a close contender like Rekha still being around. But it was left to Perez Khan, whose Qurbani hooked the nation on to disco fever and the pretty face of Zeenat Aman a few years ago, to give vent to the most accurate assessment of Dimple: "You look at her on a long shot. You see a good body, but there are many such that you're sure to find all around. Move the camera closer. Well, a remarkable face, something that always seems freshly washed, but made somewhat alien-looking with that longish nose of hers and the watery eyes. But now look at her big close-up. It is not at all the face of a woman who is acting her part: she is a woman who is just dying to be herself on screen."In an industry dominated by its cerebral Shabana Azmis and highly paid mannequins like Jaya Prada and Sridevi, Dimple Kapadia is the unabashed announcement of a return of to India Today MagazineTrending Reel
