Sharmila Tagore was told it was ‘professional suicide’ to marry Tiger Pataudi, says daughter Soha: ‘She married someone from another religion’ | Bollywood News

Veteran actor Sharmila Tagore married cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi when she was at the peak of her career and in a recent interview, their daughter Soha Ali Khan said that people told her mother that this was “professional suicide.” Soha shared that all her life, her mother was always asked how her husband was “allowing” her to work in the movies and she always found this question quite bizarre.
Talking to Nayandeep Rakshit on his YouTube channel, Soha shared that Sharmila started earning her own money at the age of 13 when she started working in the movies, even though it was frowned upon in those days. “She was earning her own money from the age of 13. She was working in films, which, definitely, at that point, was, good girls don’t work in films. And she chose to get married to someone from another religion because her heart told her to do that and her whole life she was asked, ‘how is your husband allowing you to work after marriage?’ And she was like, ‘what do you mean allowing?’ And my father was so liberal in his thinking. I really think he broke the mould,” she said.
Soha shared that when Sharmila was working in the movies, female characters in the movies were either the heroines, or the mothers. “Earlier, in her time, you were either the heroine or the mother, and in the middle you didn’t know what to do. And she always liked to do new things,” she said. Soha said that even in a film like Aradhana, where Sharmila played the lead role alongside Rajesh Khanna, she also had a part in the film where she played his mother. “She had grey hair and a bunch of make up even though she was 26 or something at the time,” she said.
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She shared that when Sharmila decided to get married at the age of 24 to Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, who came from a different faith, people said it would be “professional suicide” but she decided to do it anyway. “She has always done what she wanted to do. At the height of her career, she chose to get married to my father and everyone said ‘this is like professional suicide, how can you o it?’ She said ‘I don’t care, I am doing this’ and she kept working,” she shared.
Sharmila and Mansoor were married for 43 years until he passed away in 2011.