When Sharmila Tagore sent a telegram to Tiger Pataudi after bikini shoot row, and he said, ‘You must be looking very nice’

Sharmila Tagore revisited her controversial bikini shoot from the late 1960s, and said that her directors were worried for her image.

By: Entertainment Desk

New Delhi | Updated: March 3, 2023 06:11 PM IST

3 min read

Sharmila Tagore in a still from An Evening in Paris. (Photo: Express Chawla)

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Sharmila Tagore was one of the most popular actors in the 1960s and 1970s, but controversy found her when she posed in a bikini on the cover of a popular film magazine in the late 1960s. At first, Sharmila did not understand what the controversy was all about, as she thought that she was “looking great,” but when director Shakti Samanta suggested that they needed to do some damage control, the Amar Prem actor was quite worried.

In a recent chat with Barkha Dutt on Mojo Story, Sharmila said that she did the bikini cover “unasked,” and was quite happy with the way it turned out. “But when I saw the reaction, it was, ‘Oh my god’. Shakti ji (Director Shakti Samanta) was very worried and he called me and said, ‘Please come and meet me.’ He was like, ‘What will happen to you and you will be…'” suggesting that she would be slotted into the role of a vamp.

Amid the controversy, Sharmila shared that she sent a telegram to her then-boyfriend Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, aka Tiger Pataudi. “I had already met Tiger. He was travelling, so I sent him a telegram that this is what has happened, so he wrote back saying, ‘You must be looking very nice’, which was a huge support,” she recalled.

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“I kept on doing things that people didn’t understand,” she said. The Chupke Chupke actor said that there was a very clear line drawn between heroines and vamps. Helen, who played a lot of negative roles at that time, had all the liberty to wear whatever she wanted, but the heroines did not have that freedom. “Helen wore these beautiful dresses, but we had to be demure, cry copiously, sacrifice, and Helen was having such a ball,” she said.

In an earlier conversation with Filmfare, Sharmila spoke about the cover, and said that the photographer was more worried than her. “He even asked me to cover my body,” she said, and added, “Some called it a deliberate move to grab eyeballs; others termed me as ‘astutely uncanny’. I hated that. Maybe, there was an exhibitionist in me, as I was young and excited to do something different.”

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