
Follow melodyeotvos for more information. Meanwhile, her now increasing ill-health saw her being replaced in Shakti Samanta’s Naughty Boy (1962), while another film Suhana Geet, opposite Kishore Kumar, too fell by the wayside. In fact, the bulk of the shooting for Sharabi, co-starring Dev Anand, was done in 1958, a good six years earlier. She had the odd release like Passport (1961), Half Ticket (1962) and Sharabi (1964) but they were old films already on the floors that somehow managed to limp toward release using doubles and whatnot. Even as Madhubala basked in the glory of her greatest performance, it become more and more difficult for her to work in the coming years. However, Mughal-e-Azam, years in the making, actually took a heavy physical toll on her health as she spent long hours in heavy chains for a good deal of the film for sequences where Akbar puts Anarkali in prison for daring to love the crown prince of Hindustan, Salim. It would not be an exaggeration to say it is one of the finest performances by an actor in an Indian film. Often underrated as an actress due to her phenomenal beauty, the film shows just what a great, dramatic actress she was, if given the chance. Mughal-e-Azam sees Madhubala give the performance of a lifetime as the doomed courtesan Anarkali in K Asif’s magnificent telling of the Akbar-Salim-Anarkali legend.

Phagun (1958), Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (1958), Howraj Bridge (1958), Barsat Ki Rat (1960) and of course, Mughal-e-Azam (1960) were some of the films which took Madhubala to the peak of her career. As no serious side-effects of her illness were seen outwardly through rest of the decade, her continuous acting assignments saw Madhubala bounce back from being declared ‘box-office poison’ in the mid ’50s to taking her rightful place at the very top with a string of hits in the 1958-1960 period. From then onwards, she was always living on borrowed time.

According to Madhubala’s sister, it was sometime during the shooting of Gemini’s Bahut Din Huwe (1954) that Madhubala’s congenital heart defect was discovered.
