Devika Rani

Devika Rani
Rani in Nirmala (1938)
Born	Devika Rani Chaudhuri (1908-03-30)30 March 1908 Vizagapatam, Madras Presidency, British India (present-day Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India)
Died	9 March 1994(1994-03-09) (aged 85) Bangalore, Karnataka, India
Other names	Devika Rani Roerich
Occupation(s)	Textile designer, fashion designer, actress
Years active	1928–1943
Spouses	Himanshu Rai (1929–1940)[1] Svetoslav Roerich (1945–1993)
Awards	Dadasaheb Phalke Award in (1969)
Honours	Padma Shri in (1958)
Signature

Devika Rani Chaudhuri (30 March 1908 – 9 March 1994), usually known as Devika Rani, was an Indian actress who was active in Hindi films during the 1930s and 1940s. She was the first recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, and was also awarded the Padma Shri. Widely acknowledged as the First Lady of Indian cinema, Devika Rani had a successful film career that spanned 10 years.

Born into a wealthy, anglicized Indian family, Devika Rani was sent to boarding school in England at age nine and grew up in that country. In 1928, she met Himanshu Rai, an Indian film-producer, and married him the following year. She assisted in costume design and art direction for Rai's experimental silent film A Throw of Dice (1929).^[a] Both of them then went to Germany and received training in film-making at UFA Studios in Berlin. Rai then cast himself as hero and her as heroine in his next production, the bilingual film Karma, made simultaneously in English and Hindi. The film premiered in England in 1933, elicited interest there for a prolonged kissing scene featuring the real-life couple, and flopped badly in India. The couple returned to Bombay, India in 1934, where Himanshu Rai established a production studio, Bombay Talkies, in partnership with certain other people. They changed their studio name. The studio produced several successful films over the next 5–6 years in that time of period, and Devika Rani played the lead role in many of them. Her on-screen pairing with Ashok Kumar became popular in India.

Following Rai's death in 1940, Devika Rani took control of the studio and produced some more films in partnership with her late husband's associates, namely Sashadhar Mukherjee and Ashok Kumar. As she was to recollect in her old age, the films which she supervised tended to flop Or average hit, while the films supervised by the partners tended to be hits. In 1945, she retired from films, married the Russian painter Svetoslav Roerich and moved to his estate on the outskirts of Bangalore, thereafter leading a very reclusive life for the next five decades. Her persona, no less than her film roles, were considered socially unconventional. Her awards include the Padma Shri (1958), Dadasaheb Phalke Award (1969) and the Soviet Land Nehru Award (1990).

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