‘Hema Malini totally left out by first family after Dharmendra’s death,’ says Shobhaa De: ‘She chose dignity over one-upmanship’

Hema Malini remained absent from Dharmendra's prayer meet held by his first wife Prakash Kaur sons Sunny and Bobby Deol.

Hema Malini and Dharmendra were married for over 45 years. (Photo: Express Archive)

Veteran actor Dharmendra passed away in November at 89, and soon after his passing, there were two prayer meets held for the actor – one by his first family, led by first wife Prakash Kaur and sons Sunny and Bobbu Deol, and the other led by second wife Hema Malini and her daughters Esha and Ahana Deol. Days after this, Hema held another prayer meet for Dharmendra in Delhi, which was attended by her colleagues in her political party. Shobhaa De recently spoke about Hema’s dignity and how she conducted herself through this ordeal, as she and her daughters were effectively frozen out by the first family.

In a chat with Barkha Dutt on the YouTube channel Mojo Story, Shobhaa said that this “Must have been a particularly difficult and hard decision… To be totally left out by the first family from something that she had spent 45 years of her own life… Nourishing, cherishing, which had enriched her life. She had two daughters from this marriage. It must have hurt terribly, but she kept all that for her own privacy. However she wished to deal with it and when she did have a public function, I thought she conducted it with utmost dignity, not just for herself but for the person she had lost..”

Shobhaa said that Hema could have “hijacked those emotional moments” after Dharmendra’s passing but she chose dignity over “one-upmanship.” She said, “Given the fact that Hema is a towering personality herself, the idea that she chose dignity over making a public display of one-upmanship, I think, says a lot about her character. She could so easily have, in a way, it’s not a nice word but, hijacked those emotional moments right after Dharam ji passed away. The media would have loved to cover every tear and every gasp that she may have taken and intruded into her privacy and completely stripped her of the dignity that obviously matters so much to her.”

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Hema is a Member of Parliament from Mathura and Shobhaa said that the “ruling party would have probably bent over backwards had she just indicated that she would have wanted something on a huge scale to mark the passing of… He was her husband at the end of it all.” She added, “He had two parallel families. A primary family and her, but at no point had either of them disengaged or disowned one another as husband and wife. So I think she chose well, she chose like Hema Malini.”

Hema married Dharmendra in 1980 when he was already married to Prakash Kaur, and was a father to four children. He never left his first wife after marrying Hema. He had two daughters with Hema and the second family lived across the road from his main residence, housing his first family.

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