Jaya Bhaduri is today better known as Jaya Bachchan, wife of Amitabh Bachchan, mother of Abhishek Bachchan, and mother-in-law of Aishwarya Rai. But in her heyday in the early 1970s, she was extremely popular in her own right, carving out a niche for herself as the Girl Next Door in an industry full of more glamorous and ethereal women. When she married Amitabh, she was actually better-known than he was, and remained so until he stopped trying to break into family dramas and arthouse films and focused on macho action movies. Unlike many Bollywood actresses of the period, she continued to work after marriage-she was pregnant with her second child when she appeared as Amitabh's love interest in Sholay. Her last film as a leading lady, Silsila, was something of a Refuge in Audacity on her part. The media was trying to stir up stories about a romance between her husband and his frequent co-star Rekha. Allegedly, Jaya arranged for the three of them to be cast in Silsila (Amitabh as a straying husband, Jaya as the wife, and Rekha as the other woman) in an attempt to psyche out the media.
After Silsila, Jaya largely retired from filmmaking and went into politics, but came back in the Oughts for a string of "mother roles" staring with Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham. In the 2010s, she has largely stopped working again in film, apparently due to her not liking the direction Bollywood has taken in recent years.
