A scintillating debut with Bobby in 1973. Marriage to the nation’s No.1 superstar Rajesh Khanna, the same year… And she was just 16! Life was enormously generous to Dimple Kapadia. But then she also had to pay the price… She retired from acting to raise her daughters Twinkle and Rinke.

Apparently, it was Khanna who had put a ban on her acting career promptly after the marriage, though Kapadia has once noted that "career has always been secondary" to her. She separated from Khanna in April 1982. In an interview, she remarked, “The life and happiness in our house came to an end the day I and Rajesh got married,” adding that their marriage was “a farce”.

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Two years after their separation, she returned to films and enjoyed a fairly successful career in both commercial and off-beat cinema. Over the years she managed to heal ties with estranged husband Rajesh Khanna to a large extent. Steering clear of remarrying, she has reportedly been in a long-standing relationship with Sunny Deol. Now a doting grandma, Dimple still defies classification…

She is known to be assertive and even moody. During the making of Janbaaz (1986), director Feroz Khan had declared of her, “No other girl has so much of pent-up aggression.” Veteran journalist Bhawana Somaaya called her “a strange bundle of contradictions. Her moods change in a jiffy.” The founding editor of Stardust magazine, Shobha Dé explained it thus: “Dimple hates being 'surveyed' and she finds herself in that unenviable situation all the time.”

Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, with whom she first worked in Kaash (1987), believed that Dimple had gone through so much in her life that she didn’t have to read up the textbooks of method acting to play a real woman. Commenting on her move to art cinema years later, Bhatt complimented her for not turning into “a victim of her own success” by refusing to become “a part of the money-making machine”.

Mrinal Sen, who directed Dimple in Antareen (1994), compared her to Sophia Loren and described her face as "a landscape of desolation". Director Govind Nihalani noted that she was “genuinely interested in doing serious work, something that challenges her talent.”

Dimple’s critics believe that her temperamental nature cost her many professional opportunities. However, all Dimple has said in her defence is, “I am moody by nature. But I have never consciously hurt anyone.”

…And that makes all the difference in our book!