Pavitra Rishta's Usha Nadkarni lives alone at 80: 'My son says I've only given birth to him'

Dubai: Most people know her face before they know her name. Nearly seven decades of Marathi theatre, Hindi film and television, and a role in Pavitra Rishta that made her a fixture in millions of homes.

At 80, she is still working, and still living by herself in Mumbai. Across a handful of interviews over the past few years she has been unusually direct about how she arrived at both.

A flat in Mumbai since 1987

She has lived alone for almost four decades. Her son is abroad now and her siblings have all died, which leaves the flat and her own company.

"I'm used to it," she told Rajshri Marathi. "I'm not scared at all. I used to be scared when I first moved into my building. I would ask the guard to accompany me to my door because I was afraid somebody would attack me from behind. But I'm not scared anymore."

"People can't tell how they'll die. Some people go in their sleep, some people die in the hospital. I'm not scared even one bit."

The cost of the work

That solitude is partly the shape her career left behind.

Her son was raised largely by her mother, at her brother's house, while she worked. Marathi theatre meant multiple performances a day and no schedule to plan around. "I would go visit him when I had the time," she told Pinkvilla.

She repeats what he says about it now without softening it, which is either remarkable composure or a wound worn smooth by repetition.

"My son still tells me that I've only given birth to him. His real mother was my mother."

Where the toughness came from

None of this appears to surprise her, and the reason sits further back.

Her father, an Air Force officer, was violent. Speaking on Bharti Singh and Haarsh Limbachiyaa's podcast, she described a house where a crumpled newspaper or untidily stacked schoolbooks could set off an outburst. On one occasion, stepping in while her brother was being beaten, she was injured badly enough that she performed with the wound the following day.

She did not stop performing.

Thrown out at 14 or so, back within a week

The opposition to her acting came from her mother rather than her father, which she still defends as reasonable.

Her mother was a teacher, the family was middle class, and the neighbours talked. Usha was put out of the house, her belongings went onto the street, and she stayed with a friend for about a week before her father came and brought her home.

Her opinion on her neighbours has not mellowed. "To hell with those people," she said on Sony TV's Tum Ho Naa. "You should do whatever you want."

Which she did, without pause, for the next sixty-odd years.

"I first acted when I was in 4th standard. Now I am 80, and I am still acting."