A familiar face was spotted in Varsha Bharath's recent Tamil coming-of-age film Bad Girl. Playing the protagonist's mother is Shanthi Priya, the '90s actor who appeared widely in Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu movies. In fact, she's also the first co-star of Akshay Kumar as she made her Hindi cinema debut opposite him in Raj N Sippy's 1991 action film Saugandh. Shanthipriya is the younger sister of actor Bhanupriya. She made her acting debut with Relangi Narsimha Rao's 1987 Telugu comedy Kaboye Alludu. The same year, she also made her Tamil debut with Gangai Amaran's romantic movie Enga Ooru Pattukaran. She was credited as Nishanthi in Tamil films. She continued to work across the Tamil and Telugu film industries for years, even playing Shakunthala in the 1989 mythological television show Vishwamitra. Two years later, she made her Bollywood debut with Saugandh, playing Akshay Kumar's love interest. The next year, she also starred alongside Mithun Chakraborty in Rajesh Vakil's Mere Sajana Saath Nibhana. Shanthi Priya took a step back from South movies after the 1992 Tamil film Uyarthavan. She turned her attention completely to Hindi films, starring in Ashok Gaikwad's 1993 revenge saga Phool Aur Angaar, reuniting with Mithun. They were paired up again for K Ravi Shankar's Meherbaan the same year. Shanthi Priya then romanced Prosenjit Chatterjee in Shibu Mitra's Veertaa the same year, before reuniting with her Saugandh team - Akshay Kumar and Raj N Sippy - for another action film, Ikke Pe Ikka in 1994. She then got busy with marriage and motherhood, and quit acting for eight years. "I just got married and I wanted to enjoy my married life. I wanted to give my best to it. Mumbai was completely a new place for me and I was from South India and he was a mix of Maharashtra and Bengal, so I wanted to learn all that and give my all to it. It wasn't ever like they asked me to stop acting or such," said Shanthi Priya in a recent interview with SCREEN. She tied the knot with fellow actor Siddharth Ray, the grandson of legendary actor-filmmaker V Shantaram. He's best known for playing Inspector Karan in Abbas-Mustan's 1993 romantic thriller Baazigar, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, and Shilpa Shetty. "He came from a huge film family, but he never had that attitude in him. He dressed in a very simple manner. Eventually, we got to know each other and within a year of our first meeting, we tied the knot," the actor revealed. Shanthi Priya and Siddharth Ray became parents to two sons. However, he died of a heart attack in 2004. "We were all at the dinner table. Me, him and our two sons when he suddenly had a hiccup and he dropped his head," recalled Shanthi, adding, "I suddenly started to push people away. I shooed them. I didn't cry. Didn't want to feel helpless." Right before that, she had returned to acting with the superhero space opera TV show Aryamaan in 2002. But the upheaval in her personal life forced her to take backseat again. Shanthi then returned to TV in 2008, playing Mata Vaishno Devi in the Sahara One show Mata Ki Chowki. She essayed another mythological character, Devaki, in the 2011 show Dwarkadheesh Bhagwaan Shree Krishna. Over 10 years later, Shanthi Priya made her streaming debut in Sarthak Dasgupta's 2022 crime drama Dharavi Bank on MXPlayer. However, she returned to the big screen only this year, playing Meenakshi, a middle-class Tamil mother to her rebellious daughter Ramya (played by Anjali Sivaraman) in Bad Girl, helmed by debutante director Varsha Bharath, and co-produced by Vetrimaaran and Anurag Kashyap. Also Read - ‘Akshay Kumar never apologised for remark’: His first co-star Shanti Priya recalls atmosphere on set when he commented on her complexion "I had taken a small interval, but an artist is always an artist, with me being a dancer too. Only the technicality and the way of filmmaking has changed, but an artist will always act the way the captain is told," said the actor in another recent interview to SCREEN. She agreed there's a vast difference between the Shanthi Priya of Saugandh and the Shanthi Priya of Bad Girl. She also agreed that like her, Akshay has also matured majorly. "Very proud of him," she said.
