She’s the highest paid, most endorsement-heavy actress in B-Town, she raked in a startling Dh5.5 million for her latest film Heroine, and she’s one of the few starlets to have ever worked with the three Khans – Aamir, SRK and Salman. But some say the 32-year-old’s pole position has her nervous, and the fact that she has 22 flops compared to only 16 hits under her belt means she’s aware that she has to constantly fight to stop other actresses from taking her number-one crown. Are there more similarities between her and the failing actress she plays in Heroine than most realise? Scene takes a look inside the paranoid world of Kareena Kapoor….
“Career-defining” film fails
Controversial film Heroine, which delves into the seedy behind-the-scenes world of Bollywood and hit screens last Thursday, was described by director Mandur Bhandarkar as Bebo’s “career-defining” film, and saw the marketing-savvy starlet on a particularly aggressive campaign trail. “In a career spanning a decade, Heroine is one of the films I have felt very close to,” the star gushed, explaining why she was so involved in the film’s promotion. “I have invested so much in this film emotionally that at the end of it, it has left me drained.
The film is such an obsession for me; it almost feels like my first born.” The fact that critics have almost universally panned the movie, calling it, “incredibly boring” and full of “unintentional laughs” is likely to have wounded the proud star, and some B-Town watchers believe this is why both Kareena (who flew to London to celebrate her 32nd birthday) and the male lead in the film, Arjun Kapoor (who jetted straight to Istanbul) left town on the day of the film’s release. “It really looks as if the actors had a premonition about the much-hyped movie not doing very well,” an industry expert suggested, “and we guess they actually timed their vacation to avoid those measly ratings.”
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