Multi-lingual film actress Padmini dies at age 74

New Delhi: Padmini, a well-known actress and dancer whose decades-long career spanned hundreds of movies shot in many of India's languages, has died of a heart attack, a news report said yesterday. She was 74.

Padmini died in a hospital on Sunday in Chennai. She is survived by a son, Anand, who lives in the US.

Padmini made her debut in the 1949 Hindi language film Kalpana. She went on to act in more than 250 movies, many of them in Hindi and numerous others in the predominant languages of southern India Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada.

Born in a southern Indian region then known as Travancore an area that today is part of Kerala state Padmini, along with her actress siblings, Lalitha and Ragini, became known as the Travancore Sisters.

Indian movies are famous for their song-and-dance routines, and the sisters, all of whom trained in classical Indian dance, were featured in numerous dance scenes in movies from the late 1940s through the 1960s.

But Padmini left the movie business in the early 1970s after marrying a doctor and moving to New Jersey, where she set up a dance school, the Padmini School of Fine Arts.

Following her husband's death in 1981, Padmini resumed acting in Tamil films, dividing her time between New Jersey and Chennai, southern India's movie industry hub.