Actor Supriya Devi no more

KOLKATA: Supriya Devi, whose statuesque beauty left a generation of admirers in swoon; whose onscreen partnership with Uttam Kumar in ‘Basu Paribar’, ‘Bilambito Loy’, ‘Sonar Horin’, ‘Bagh Bandi Khela’, ‘Chowringhee’ and ‘Sanyasi Raja’ was as discussed as her off-screen relationship with the Mahanayak and whose heartwrenching cry — “Dada, aami kintu banchte cheyechhilam… dada, ami banchbo…” (“Brother, I wanted to live… brother, I will live…”) — in director Ritwik Ghatak’s classic ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ haunted millions of cinegoers, succumbed to cardiac arrest at her residence on Friday morning.

She was 85. Fellow actor Soumitra Chatterjee mourned the loss of his co-star for 60 years. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee described her as “one of the leading lights of the golden era of Bengali films.”

Born in 1933 in

Myanmar

(erstwhile Burma), Supriya made her debut in ‘Basu Paribar’. A broken marriage and her single mother status didn’t pose as hurdles when she returned to become the ‘Sophia Loren of Bengal’. In Hindi cinema, she acted opposite Dharmendra in ‘Begaana’ and ‘Aap Ki Parchaiyan’ and Kishore Kumar’s ‘Door Gagan Ki Chhayon Mein’.

In 1960, Ghatak cast her in ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ as

Neeta

— a character which became a subject of international discourse and later inspired Mira Nair to cast her in ‘The Namesake’.