Bollywood actresses like Rani Mukherjee , Preity Zinta , Sushmita Sen and Shilpa Shetty .Every year fresh blood is injected into the industry in the desirable shapes of newcomers while the oldies are pushed a step back. Backward steps it has been one too many for those actresses who ruled the marquee at the start of this millennium. With the rise of beauties like Katrina Kaif , Kareena Kapoor , Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra , the senior actresses are increasingly losing their foothold in tinsel town; their talent (or the lack of it) notwithstanding.
The lull after the storm has continued way too long for Rani Mukherjee who used to walk away with best actress trophies at most award functions just a few years ago. She reached the pinnacle of her career with Black and thereafter it has only been a downslide with a string of flops like Tara Rum Pum , Laaga Chunari Mein Daag and Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic . In retrospect, her career graph looks no less tragic than the weepy roles she played with such aplomb. Today, Rani is, despite her talent, at the rock bottom of her career - with only one Yashraj Film in her kitty.
Preity Zinta has done a wise thing by moving away from commercial cinema after the super debacle of her film Jhoom Barabar Jhoom . Knowing well that she can’t dance around the trees anymore, Preity has switched to art-house cinema, playing what are commonly referred to as ‘sensible’ roles in ‘thought-provoking’ films. She’s done The Last Lear with Amitabh Bachchan , Har Pall with Dharmendra , and Deepa Mehta’s Heaven On Earth , in which Preity is said to have given the performance of her life. But when it comes to Bollywood mainstream, Preity doesn’t have much on hands.
Lady-luck gave a lease of life to the almost sunk career of Shilpa Shetty when she won the UK’s reality show Big Brother last year. An actress who had never won an award (for her acting) and did not even showed any promise to win one was suddenly being written about in media. And Shilpa was signed on by an actor no younger than Sunny Deol for his film The Man . The last we saw of her was also with the senior Deol in Apne . Perhaps somewhere deep down Shilpa herself realizes that she is looking at the sunset of her career and has decided to launch her own production house.
When it comes to ignoring one’s own career, no other actress matches up to Sushmita Sen, the reclusive beauty who once won the Miss Universe tiara and showed the promise of being numero uno in Bollywood; but she threw it all away. What she lacked was not the talent, but the desire or passion to be on the top. Perhaps she has reserved all the passion for her dream project on Rani Laxmibai which she intends to produce and direct herself. Apart from this, her Dulha Mil Gaya has been in the making for about two years now (yawn), and she recently began working with Govinda in a comedy called Do Knot Disturb .
Apart from these beauties there are likes of Aishwarya Rai and Bipasha Basu whose careers still have a potential life of two or three years before they too begin to fade away.
