Nadira

Nadira was a beautiful yesteryears actress in Indian cinema. According to her horoscope, She was born on December 5 1932 and would have been celebrating her 80th Birthday, if she was alive today. Her actual name is Florence Ezekiel Nadira. She was born in a Baghdadi Jewish family in Israel and has two brothers. One of her brothers lives in Israel and another in USA. Nadira came to India during 1940s and tried to enter the film industry to make her career.

Eventually, she started working in films and worked in almost more than 60 movies. Nadira was a Jew by religion and lived in Nagpada in South Mumbai, an area mostly filled with Jewish and Muslims. She was just 19 years old when she first got a break in the Bollywood film named Aan in 1952 opposite Dilip Kumar, and is directed and produced by Mehboob Khan. In this film, she played the role of a savage princess and she acted a bold scene as well. Her next film was Shree 420, which came in 1955 and in that, she played the character Maya, a rich socialite. Nadira's beauty and glowing skin, were an advantage that fetched her many lead roles in films such as Hanste Zakhm, Dil Aona Prit Parayee, Amar Akbar Anthony and Pakeezah. Later on, she even enacted the negative and vamp roles opposite the chaste heroines.

Then in the film Julie, which came in 1975, Nadira played mother to Julie and her character's name was Margaret, Maggie. For this role, she received the Filmfare Best Supporting Actress Award. From then onwards, she started accepting the supporting roles of elderly women mainly during 1980s and 1990s. Her last performance was seen in the movie Josh (2000) that starred Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. In her entire career, most of the roles she portrayed was of Christian or Anglo Indian. This was mainly due to her western attire that got her these characters. She also starred in a tele-serial named Margaritta that also had the model turned actor, Milind Soman.

Nadira was a Sagittarian and her sun sign Sagittarius describes her as an independent woman who loved her freedom. She was bold, beautiful, pleasant, and ambitious and an actress, much ahead of her time. She was also one of the first actress from India to have a Rolls-Royce. Nadira first married Naqshab, who was an Urdu poet and film-maker. Unfortunately, that marriage broke and she married the second time with a man, whom, she used to call a gold-digger. But that marriage also lasted only a week. During her last stage of life, Nadira lived alone with a housekeeper. Due to her prolonged illness, Nadira, who aged 73 at that time, had her last breath on February 9 2006 , at the Bhatia Hospital in Mumbai. I shared Javed Jafri's horoscope.