MUMBAI - In an industry that is still slave to dynasty and lineage, a British-Asian girl emerges from nowhere and attains vertiginous heights in Bollywood. Katrina Kaif has defied all conventional film wisdom - she barely spoke Hindi, her acting skills came up for debate and she is politically correct in interviews to the point of boredom. But Katrina has the x-factor, accentuated by an angelic face and a body that could tempt the devil. Katrina’s box-office track record is enviable. Considered a good luck mascot, she is much in demand and is probably among the few actresses who can boast of working with all the Khans. But her superstar status today is by no means a fluke.
Perhaps the fact that Katrina has not grown up with a sense of entitlement, like other star kids, has contributed to her success. She never seems to take her success for granted. Directors vouch for her commitment, and her acting skills and diction have improved over the years. And she seems to have mastered the art of Khan management. No mean feat, if you think about it. Katrina has delicately worked around temperamental boyfriends, bloated egos and fickle relationships and built goodwill that spans diverse camps. Yet for all her astute networking, few seem to know the real Katrina. Vague information filters in about her past, she hides behind a veneer of correctness. What we don’t know about her just seems to add to her mystique.
Katrina first floated into the industry with her debut, ‘Boom’ (2003). The director though, refuses to talk about his discovery as he tersely says, “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” ‘Boom’ producer Ayesha Shroff is more forthcoming, “During the course of some research, Kaizad chanced upon her. He tells me that a few days later, she went to his house and asked him, ‘I’m interested in India. Do you think I have a future in India as a model or in films?’ She came down to Mumbai, auditioned and got the role. I thought she would have a career here. At that time, there was nobody with a good body, no one was wearing bikinis.”
But where did Kaizad meet her? Ayesha refuses to say. What she does talk about is how Katrina got her last name. “Her passport says Turquotte. We thought we’d give her some kind of Indian ancestry, to connect with the audience. But then we thought that Kazi sounded too... religious? Mohammad Kaif was at the top, and so we said, Katrina Kaif sounds really great. In fact, the brochures for the press say Katrina Kazi. We passed that off saying, ‘Oh that’s a printing mistake,” says Ayesha. Is Katrina in touch with her? “No. But that’s a personal choice. What hurts me is that when ‘Boom’ released, she was seeing Salman, she dismissed her debut saying she didn’t know what she was doing and so she did the bikini scene, the smooching scene. She knows what she has going and doesn’t want to jeopardise it.”
After ‘Boom’, her early success was ‘Maine Pyaar Kyun Kiya’ and later ‘Partner’, both starring Salman. The director says that it was her attention to scenes and rehearsals that was endearing. She didn’t throw tantrums and she was friendly and warm. Salman at that time was always teaching her a thing or two on the sets, but the director insists, “Just being in someone’s good books doesn’t work. The audience really loves her.” This sentiment is echoed by her ‘Tees Maar Khan’ director Farah Khan, “Katrina has the X-factor. There are prettier girls who haven’t made it. She has the same fire that actresses like Sridevi and Madhuri had. The audiences love her, especially the kids.” Farah adds that no one promotes a film like Katrina does. And that she has never heard Katrina backbite. She says, “Katrina stresses about the way she looks. But she never frets over petty issues like ‘my vanity van is too small’. Katrina is quite the family girl.”
In an earlier interview, Katrina said, “All my life I have judged my worth by how much I have been loved by a man. It’s so with a lot of women, that their self-esteem is measured by how much they are loved by a man, their partner, their boyfriend or may be their husband. In my case, it may be because I grew up without my father. But now that I am more mature and not eighteen any more; I have learnt to overcome that and understand that I have my own destiny and life.” Destiny’s child has come into her own.
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