What's so beautiful about actress Madhubala?

She destined to be rich but have an unhappy life and will die at an young age, a fortuneteller told her once.

Born as Mumtaz in a family of 13 people whose survival is difficult, she worked hard to carve herself into Madubala, who had successfully completed acting in 70 films and 5 successful hit movies and finally became an epitome of beauty through Mughal e Azam. Her acting skill had reached a new level which is incomparable and she become a member of Bollywood who will always be remembered till the time Bollywood remain.

Beauty lies in the eye of the viewer once told by Rabindra Nath Tagore. She is termed as one of the most beautiful woman in Bollywood not only because of her looks but also because of her treatment of others in the film set. She worked with many directors, producers and top actors like Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand, Raj Kapoor, Ashok Kumar, Sunil Dutt, Shammi Kapoor, Kishore Kumar etc. Everyone says she is a nice person to work with and they all love her.

Her favorite color is white and she look dazzled in the same. Once a director visited her house for a film project and when she come out in while saree, he simply can't move because of her simplicity and beauty.

Her beauty is not limited in India, she was famous in Hollywood also. One article was submitted by Theatre Arts Magazine in 1952 as “The biggest star in the world.”

Here is the article:-

Madhubala – The Biggest Star in The World

The actress with the greatest following, in numbers and devotion, is not to be found in Hollywood, but on the opposite side of the planet — in Bombay, India.

Her name is Madhubala. She is nineteen years old, a small girl with arching eyebrows and a shy, sweet smile, who has risen to the top of the Indian movie industry in the last two years.

Madhubala’s local audience is taken from the 420,000,000 people of India and Pakistan (about the population of the United States and all western Europe combined). Her pictures have also a lively export market in Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and East Africa. In India alone, the movie theatres take in 75,000,000 paid admissions a month, at prices as low as three cents a ticket.

On an average, since she first became a star, Madhubala has completed four pictures a year and at one point early this year was under contract to make as many as nine for various producers — work­ing on two or three at the same time.

She is the highest paid star in her industry, and her industry is fast catching up with the biggest.

India now produces nearly 300 feature pictures a year, as against Hollywood’s 450. About a dozen of India’s films in any year will star Madhubala. A single issue of a movie magazine will run a slew of advertisements, reviews and pictures of Madhubala. And both she and the Indian movie industry can justly claim that they have hardly started.

American ignorance of Madhubala is understandable. For one thing, the riotous movie boom in India dates only from around 1943. For another, Mad­hubala’s ascendancy is only two years old, and she herself is a new phenomenon in the eastern world.

The story of India for the past ten years may be condensed as: The war, the movie boom, independ­ence, and Madhubala. Independence and Madhu­bala seem to go together, for reasons that may seem baffling to westerners. It may help to explain what India looks for in a beautiful woman. It does not, of course, want a blonde. The invariable attributes of an Indian actress are large, languishing brown eyes, a full-lipped mouth and an aquiline nose. India’s former stars had these, but they were usually gen­erously padded ladies given to overacting.

Madhubala has the classic features, but she has added something. Her modeling is both finer and bolder. She turns the traditional wantonness of a Hindu actress into spiritual recklessness, controlled by pride and fastidiousness. Madhubala not only has intelligence; she even looks intelligent. She uses a typical stare in her love scenes that is both confiding and questioning, as if she were challenging the hero to be all she is supposed to think he is. With a look, she defies the Hindu dogma that a man is superior to a woman.

Furthermore, Madhubala has the wide shoulders and athletic body of the modern girl the world over, a type fairly new to India. She walks like a dancer, that is, a western ballet dancer, not a Hindu dancer, who usually stands bowlegged on her heels and monotonously wiggles her neck and arms.

AS A NEW type in India, Madhubala must probably stand for the ideal of the free Indian woman or what India hopes the free Indian woman will be. She is in that sense a symbol of the advance guard of a revolution.

She died at the age of 36, the same age other famous celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and Bob Marley had died.