Nobody in Bollywood was betting on the outsider Katrina Kaif, but a surging need to forge stability for herself and her siblings has driven her to the top. Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:
Katrina Kaif
Katrina came to India at 17 as part of director Kaizad Gustad’s film Boom: he had spotted her as a model in an ad in London. It should have been a grand debut, boasting as it did a cast that included Amitabh Bachchan, Jackie Shroff, Madhu Sapre and Padma Lakshmi. But, for all its apparent star and skin power, the film flopped badly. That could have been the end of Katrina’s Bollywood career – she was young, an outsider, and incapable of a word of Hindi. Instead, in barely six years, she has grown to be a commercial female superstar, moving from the anonymity of bit roles in Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi films to mainstream directors and producers like Vipul Shah, Rajkumar Santoshi and Yash Raj Films. She has learnt Hindi, taken Kathak lessons, and is spoken of in the same breath as Aishwarya Rai and Kareena Kapoor. Far from the minor-league deals of her early years, she now charges between Rs 2 to 3 crores for product campaigns and, at last count, signed a two-film deal with Studio 18 for Rs 6 crore. What explains this singular story? Who is Katrina Kaif off-screen?
It’s not very easy to piece that together. “I am a Cancerian,” she says, “and Cancerians don’t like discussing their private lives. I also don’t buy the argument that filmstars’ private lives are fair game for the public.” Even routine questions about parents and family are not easily lobbed. If you persist though – embroidering them with caveats and exit routes – they yield some answers.
One of seven siblings – six sisters, one brother, she exactly in the middle – Katrina was born to a British mother, Suzanne, and a Kashmiri Muslim father, Mohammad Kaif. “My father is not an influence, he was not part of our family; my parents separated when I was very young and I have never met him since.”
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