In Gautham Menon’s Ye Maaya Chesave, it’s love at first sight for Karthik (Naga Chaitanya) the moment he sees Jessie (Samantha) walking on the street.
The same was true for millions of people who saw the film back in 2010. It’s the kind of moment which refuses to leave your memory even after a decade - Samantha dressed in a blue sari, the slow motion walk, AR Rahman’s background score, and the way Naga Chaitanya looks at her as if he’s spellbound when she tells him that she lives in the house upstairs...everything that makes you want to believe in the magic of love.
In hindsight, it now feels like a scene straight out of a fairytale, whose appeal transcends the screen. The newcomer, who grew up in Pallavaram, became a heartthrob for Telugu moviegoers, but here’s a word of caution - Samantha will punch you if you tell her that her best performance was in Ye Maaya Chesave. “I couldn’t speak a word in Telugu when I signed the film and I was too busy memorising my lines to even remember what I was doing in front of the camera,” Samantha once said in an interview.
In subsequent years, after her debut in Telugu cinema, the actress went on to work with several top directors and actors including SS Rajamouli, Trivikram Srinivas, Mahesh Babu, Pawan Kalyan, NTR, Ram Charan, and Allu Arjun to name a few, but her journey has been anything but easy. And it wasn’t just the flops in the initial years, the actress has had to muster all her strength to bounce back after her health issue almost derailed her career.
Her stardom, over the years, has been the result of her perseverance and making peace with herself. “In the midst of my career, I made some wrong choices thinking that I need to shed my cute-girl image, and that backfired a lot. It took me a while to convince myself to build upon what people already like about me and after that, things got a lot better,” the actress told this writer. Yet, it’s her tryst with stardom and how she has dealt with it that’s more revealing about her internal struggle. She says, “For the longest time, I didn’t understand the adulation and I didn’t want to believe that it was all happening for real. Yes, there are a lot of actors who celebrate success, but I found myself wondering if I am truly worth it. It took me years to come out of that mindset and come to terms with the unconditional love which people have for me.”
Post her debut in Ye Maaya Chesave, the actress took everyone by surprise in a glamorous avatar in Vamshi Paidipally’s Brindavanam, which also had NTR Jr and Kajal Aggarwal in lead roles. The hangover of Jessie was still fresh in people’s minds, and the actress left many wondering why she had chosen a commercial film like Brindavanam after Ye Maaya Chesave. Soon, her first film with Mahesh Babu, Dookudu, turned out to be a blockbuster and she became one of the most sought after actresses in the Telugu film industry after that.
The biggest turning point in her career, post Dookudu, was choosing Rajamouli’s 2012 fantasy drama, Eega, a statement which she has repeated several times over the years. “I chose the film over a few other big budget commercial films that were offered to me at the same time. It was an unusual film where the protagonist is a house fly, but that’s the film which helped me grow immensely as an actor,” she said. The same year, she impressed yet again in Gautham Menon’s Yeto Vellipoyindhi Manasu, although the film met with a lukewarm reception at the box-office.
2012 was also a tough year for the actress, who had to opt out of Mani Ratnam’s Kadal, following, what she said, was ‘a series of repetitive infections caused due to her low immune system’. Long before she clarified what had happened to her health, her acting career hit a roadblock abruptly, and it took her a long time to get back to work. Her illness also changed her as a person, and soon after her comeback, she got involved in a lot of charity work through her NGO, Pratyusha Support to provide medical support for children and women from underprivileged background. It was her way of giving back to the society, she said, and to this day, she has continued supporting and raising funds for the NGO.
Meanwhile, her career continued to flourish with the success of films like Seethamma Vaakitlo Sirimalle Chettu and Atharintiki Daredhi in 2013, although there were some hiccups like Jabardasth and Ramayya Vastavayya in the same year. In 2014, amidst a series of commercial films like Alludu Seenu, Rabhasa, and Autonagar Surya, she charmed everyone in Vikram Kumar’s Manam, in which she was paired opposite Naga Chaitanya. The film, and her role in particular, gave a new twist to reincarnation, with Samantha playing Naga Chaitanya’s wife and Nagarjuna’s mother, so to speak. The actress pulled off both the mature and romantic traits of two different characters in the film, and it earned her a lot of respect among the audience.
In 2015, she collaborated with Trivikram Srinivas for the second time in S/O Satyamurthy, which also had Allu Arjun in a lead role. In one of the scenes in the film, Samantha confesses her love for the protagonist, and also shares that she’s diabetic, and this was seen as a bold move considering how contemporary Telugu cinema doesn’t quite discuss such health issues, except when a medical condition of the hero itself becomes a catalyst in the story. Later, when she teamed up with Trivikram, once again, for A...Aa, the actress stepped into another phase of her career, where she defied stereotypes and took up more challenging roles. Her clarion call to filmmakers to write better roles for actresses didn’t go unnoticed. Couple of years later, Samantha shattered the myth that the career of actresses ends soon after they get married. Sukumar’s Rangasthalam, in which Samantha played a village belle, turned out to be a record-smashing hit and it was largely seen as a validation that the audience can’t get enough of her.
In the past few years, Samantha has turned into a fashionista, and while she has shown her willingness to constantly experiment, the same quality has spilled over to her choices in films as well. The star in her made way for the actor in Samantha, and in almost every Telugu film that she has done since Rangasthalam, Samantha has displayed a remarkable ability to channelise all her emotions, pour her heart out, and bare her soul. Take Nag Ashwin’s Mahanati, for instance, where she played an innocent rookie journalist who finds her strength to speak up after she gets inspired from Savitri’s life, or Pawan Kumar’s mystery thriller U-Turn where she got into the shoes of a journalist who’s determined to find out the reason behind mysterious deaths of motorists, Samantha laid bare her vulnerable side in both the films and made us empathise with her instantly.
One of the best performances in her career, in recent years, was in Thiagarajan Kumararaja’s acclaimed Tamil film Super Deluxe, which had her playing Vaembu, a housewife who cheats on her husband but by the end of the film, she convinces us to root for her character, which is a hallmark of the performer she has evolved into over the years. And then, there was Shiva Nirvana’s Majili, which also had Naga Chaitanya playing the lead role, where Samantha played a housewife who yearns for her husband’s affection.
Perhaps, in years to come, Samantha will be best remembered for her exuberance in Nandini Reddy’s Oh! Baby, which followed the journey of a 70-year-old woman, who gets a second chance in life to relive her youth. Samantha, although played a 24-year-old woman, had to imbibe the body language of an elderly woman and explore another dimension of her acting style to pull off comedy. “I had sleepless nights throughout the shoot because I wanted to do it right. It’s really easy to turn the character into a caricature, something which I desperately wanted to avoid. Just before the film’s release, I freaked out so much that I almost convinced Nandini Reddy that it’s going to be a disaster, but thankfully, people liked the film. I think if a film, and a role, doesn’t give you butterflies in the stomach or make you break your head over how to pull it off, then I don’t know if I want to take it up at this point of my career. I live for such challenges,” the actress said in an interview.
Her most recent film, Jaanu, the Telugu remake of ‘96, didn’t work at the box-office, but that doesn’t change the fact that Samantha breathed life into the character, who struggles to find a closure to her past. She gulps her sadness, when she meets Ram, and doesn’t let her regrets engulf her life, even when she breaks down in the end. If that doesn’t convince you how far Samantha has come from playing Jessie to being Jaanu, then what will? Samantha has changed as a person and an actor in her decade long career, and so has the audience in recent years. She has, in recent times, dropped plenty of hints that she wants to take a break from films to focus on her family, and one can only wonder what her final film is going to be. It’s almost like watching an athlete run a marathon, who reserves her best for the final stretch. Sometimes, you just don’t want it to end because the exhilaration of watching them run that final lap is worth more than the race itself.
from Firstpost Bollywood Latest News https://ift.tt/3cgXnEm
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