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Shabana Azmi says she saw Parveen Babi ‘going mad in front of my eyes’: ‘She was struggling, said the chandelier was going to fall on her’

Shabana Azmi reveals she noticed Parveen Babi struggling with her mental health when they worked together.

Shabana Azmi and Parveen Babi worked togetehr in films like Ashanti, Amar Akbar Anthony and Jwalamukhi.

Actor Shabana Azmi and Parveen Babi became popular in Bollywood around the same time and got to work with each other in films like Amar Akbar Anthony and Jwalamukhi. Parveen was a mainstream star and while she was starting to enjoy her stardom, she was also learning to deal with her mental health problems. At the time, the world around her wasn’t equipped to help her in the right way so many of her contemporaries, could not make sense of what she was going through. In a recent interview, Shabana recalled the time when she worked with Parveen and how she started observing some changes in her.

In an appearance on Filmfare’s YouTube channel, Shabana said, “I saw Parveen Babi going mad in front of my eyes. We were doing a Prakash Mehra film, Jwalamukhi, and we were on the set, and she suddenly looked to the chandelier and started screaming, ‘This chandelier is going to fall on me.’ Even on the sets of Ashanti, I saw that she was eating very little. She used to eat two grapes and say that I am bursting,” added the actor.

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She shared another incident with Parveen and recalled that once, when Zeenat Aman was having her makeup done, Parveen went and stood behind her and “looked at her in a very strange kind of manner”. The actor said, “There were indications that something is not quite right with this girl.”

When asked about whether there was any discussion about Parveen’s mental state among the people who used to frequently work with her, Shabana replied, “We never talked about this. She was always speaking about esoteric things, discussing books, and she was a big star, but she never played the star as such, but she was in quest of an intellect that didn’t really come easy to her, but she was struggling with something.”

Parveen Babi and Shabana Azmi both climbed the ladder of the industry around the same time, with Parveen debuting in 1973 with Charitra and Azmi in 1973 with Ankur. Azmi was last seen in the Netflix series Dabba Cartel alongside Shalini Pandey, Anjali Anand, Jyothika, Nimisha Sajayan, Gajraj Rao.

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