Inside Dharmendra’s wild love story: The legend and his women who shaped his adult life

Dubai: Even now, as he battles illness and the relentless passage of time, Indian actor Dharmendra remains Bollywood’s most irresistible contradiction — a man who lived with both hands open, heart first, logic later.

Two wives, six children, thirteen grandchildren — and still, an army of fans who love him, not despite the mess, but because of it.

The man once called the 'He-Man of Hindi cinema' never pretended to be perfect. He just loved like he fought on-screen — all in.

The First Act: The family man

Long before the fame, Dharmendra was a small-town boy who married Prakash Kaur at nineteen. Together, they raised four children — Sunny, Vijeta, Ajeeta, and Bobby — and built a family rooted in simplicity.

Then came the camera, the adulation, and a film called Dil Bhi Tera Hum Bhi Tere (1960).

Enter the Dream Girl

If Bollywood ever had a love story that defied reason and rewrote the rulebook, it was Dharmendra and Hema Malini. She was the ethereal “Dream Girl” — elegant, disciplined, devastatingly self-contained. He was Punjab’s charming rebel who made romance look like rebellion.

In 1980, Dharmendra married Hema Malini — without divorcing Prakash Kaur. Two households, one heart too large to stay put. It was the kind of scandal that would’ve ended lesser men — but Dharmendra’s charisma was bulletproof. Fans didn’t turn away; they leaned in closer.

Hema, for her part, never played the wronged woman or the home-wrecker.

When I met her in Dubai, she wasn’t the aloof legend. She was real, warm, almost disarmingly human — the kind of woman who will request you to help her button her own blouse before a gala and cracks jokes while doing it.

“That will do. I suppose everybody will look at my face, right? Or at least I hope so,” she said with a throaty laugh, seconds before stepping into a room full of socialites.

That’s Hema for you — self-sufficient, unflappable, and gloriously untouched by the chaos that once surrounded her.

The Dream Girl’s take on the complicated man

When talk turned to Dharmendra, she didn’t romanticise the past or rewrite it. She simply told the truth — clear-eyed and composed.

“Every woman wants to have a husband, children, like a normal family,” she told me. “But somewhere, it went out of the way. I am not feeling bad about it. I am happy with myself. I have my two children, and I have brought them up very well.”

No bitterness. No melodrama. Just acceptance — the kind that comes only from having lived, loved, and survived it all.

And she’s quick to swat down the old rumours about her supposed conversion to Islam.

“It’s very wrong,” she said firmly. “I don’t know why people keep saying that I changed religion. It’s absolutely wrong and I didn’t do that — let me make it clear to you. I don’t know who started this rumour. It sounds funny to me.”

For someone married to a man who divided his life between two homes, two worlds, and two truths, she’s remarkably grounded.

“I have lived life on my own terms,” she told me — and you believe her.

The Deol dynasty: The many branches of one big, messy tree

From his first marriage came Sunny and Bobby Deol, Bollywood’s first action-brothers duo. Sunny married the famously reclusive Pooja Deol, while Bobby married designer Tanya Deol, who runs her own business empire. The elder sisters, Vijeta and Ajeeta (who has always kept a low profile) — one a Delhi-based entrepreneur, the other a California-based academic.

With Hema, Dharmendra had Esha and Ahana — one an actress trying to make peace with the spotlight, the other a dancer following her mother’s artistic path. Together, they form one of Bollywood’s most fascinating dynasties — glamorous, fractured, yet fiercely bonded by blood and film reels.

Even Hema acknowledges that Dharmendra still resides in Khandala with Prakash Kaur. She doesn’t flinch at the arrangement. She’s too evolved for that. Their life has always been bigger than gossip.

He may no longer stride across the screen with that trademark swagger, but Dharmendra’s legend doesn’t fade.

For all his contradictions, Dharmendra remains Bollywood’s last true romantic — messy, magnetic, and magnificently human.

He wasn’t built to be perfect. He was built to be unforgettable.