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Actor Dimple Kapadia was swept off her feet when she married superstar Rajesh Khanna, who was twice her age at the time. But their married life was marred by unrest, and she eventually left him nearly a decade later. During that time, Dimple didn’t work, and instead devoted herself to raising her two daughters. In a 1985 interview, conducted just ahead of her comeback, she reflected on life with Rajesh Khanna, and recalled the change in his behaviour when his stardom started declining.
Dimple was just 16 when she married the superstar in 1973. But shortly after that, his tenure at the top of the Bollywood pyramid drew to a close, and he was replaced by Amitabh Bachchan. “It was my first encounter in life with failure,” Dimple told India Today. “When a successful man goes to pieces, his frustration engulfs the entire surroundings. 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.”
Their differences only increased during this time, and Dimple said that she walked out on three occasions, but returned because she ‘felt sorry about the whole thing’. She continued, “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 anything… to go to any extreme… only in order to extract a smile from him.”
In the same interview, Dimple claimed that she didn’t mind the ‘procession of women’ who’d visit their house to see Rajesh, implying that he was unfaithful. But she also confessed that she stepped out of the marriage as well. “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 said.
The animosity between them subsided over the years, and Dimple was a part of the funeral procession when Rajesh died in 2012.
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