Sharmila Tagore opened up about her first salary in the film business and how she invested it back in the 1960s.
Sharmila Tagore started her career as a teenager with Satyajit Ray’s 1960 film Devi and in a recent interview, Tagore shared that Ray paid her Rs 5,000 for her first movie and she bought a lot of gold with that money. Tagore also opened up about her investments in the early part of her career and said that there were very few avenues to actually invest one’s money and it took her some time to take control of how she was spending her money.
On the YouTube show Paisa Vaisa with Anupam Gupta, the veteran actor said, “I started working pretty early in life and I started earning pretty early in life. Although the fees was not as wonderful as they are right now but again, things didn’t cost so much.” She then opened up about her remuneration for her first film and said that her father was not interested in taking any money but Ray insisted. “Nevertheless, he gave me a saree, he gave me a watch and he gave me Rs 5,000. So instantly, being a Bengali family, we went to the gold shop. We bought bangles, we bought a necklace and we bought earrings for Rs 5,000. While the money was less, things were also not that expensive.”
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Sharmila Tagore said that during her earlier Bengali films, she was getting paid around Rs 10,000-15,000 but for her first Hindi film, she was paid Rs 25,000. Her first Hindi film was 1964’s Kashmir Ki Kali, directed by Shakti Samanta. Tagore recalled that she was supposed to get Rs 25,000 each for both the films but Samanta offered her to buy a piece of land instead of her remuneration for the second film. “He said, ‘Instead of giving you money, why don’t I give you land?’ In what is now Vile Parle. So I said, ‘Are you mad? Am I going to come and live in this swamp?’ That was back in 1963,” she said.
The actor said that back in those days, she did not even live in an apartment in Mumbai and continued to live in Taj Mahal Hotel for a couple of years because “I couldn’t be bothered about housekeeping”. Tagore said that after a few years, she bought her first apartment for Rs 3 lakh and recalled it being a “struggle”. “I bought my apartment for Rs 3 lakh and it was such a struggle to arrange for that Rs 3 lakh because at that time, we were paying enormous tax. So there was no scope for capital building,” she said.
Sharmila Tagore was last seen in the film Gulmohar.
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First uploaded on: 02-04-2024 at 15:44 IST