Kollywood actress Nayanthara, who won the SIIMA Award for best actress this year for her film Irumugan, reportedly said that actresses in cinema these days, particularly mainstream cinema, don’t have much to do in films. A video of her speech, which has since been removed from YouTube, has her thanking director Anand Shankar, for having a heroine featuring in more than just the songs, reports The News Minute.
“This award is very special to me. Irumugan is a mainstream, proper proper commercial film. Usually, in a proper commercial film, with a big star like Vikram Sir, heroines won’t have much work. They won’t give them that much importance. But thank you, I really want to thank Anand Shankar, for believing in me and believing that a heroine can do so much more than just do the songs,” The News Minute quotes her from the video as saying.
Nayanthara isn’t the first actress in Tamil cinema to acknowledge the lack of roles for women. Last year, taking to Twitter, Samantha Ruth Prabhu had vented out how there is a dearth of good roles for women in the industry.
Realising just how hard it is to get a meaningful role for a heroine in the south ??????. #timeforchange #nowornever
— Samantha Ruth Prabhu (@Samanthaprabhu2) September 17, 2016
I haven’t signed as many films as I d like too only and only because there are no good roles . As disheartening as it is to say .
— Samantha Ruth Prabhu (@Samanthaprabhu2) September 17, 2016
Veteran actresses, too, have spoke about how women’s roles in most film lack depth. In an exclusive interview with Silverscreen, yesteryear actress Saroja Devi, too, spoke about a lack of women-centric roles in the industry.
“The women, too, look much the same. The Tamil cinema heroine is now a standardised format. You need a certain look, long hair, flawless skin, perfect figure. In my time, it was not so. Women chose to act after marriage, and were still revered. I have acted in films after giving birth to my children, and I know for sure that I wouldn’t be able to do that now. Jyothika is perhaps the exception to the rule.”
Suhasini Maniratnam, having featured in scores of powerful films such as Nenjathai Killathe and Sindhu Bhairavi, in a recent interview with The Indian Express admitted that women are slowly learning the tricks of the business.
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“See, 75% of the audience who come to the theaters are men. That’s what decides what kind of genre the film should be in. They are not women-centric at all. Rather, it is the women they fantasise about, or the women they see at home, or the woman they don’t want anything to do with. It is decided by men. That’s why I think women aren’t getting better roles.”
Over the years, the industry has seen a surge in the number of films centred around women. There are also actresses like Kangana Ranaut, Deepika Padukone, Vidya Balan and Radhika Apte, for whom scripts are written. These actresses are not only highly successful, but also vocal about the industry’s pay disparity and sexism.
Read: 6 Women Who Made A Mark In 2016
Also read: Long road to a level playing field – Interview with filmmaker Vaishnavi Sundar