Tragic, disturbed, deep: Parveen Babi and Mahesh Bhatt’s incomplete love story

Disastrous end of her life

Parveen Babi's last public appearance was in the year 2002 when she appeared in Shekhar Suman's TV show 'Simply Shekhar'. She was largely stable by now, but her reclusive life continued to remain and her house rarely had any visitors. She was a smart investor and hence never faced any financial woes. She only yearned for true companionship and her mental illness further aggravated her condition. She was detected with gangrene in her left foot and became wheelchair bound. On the unfateful night of January 22, 2005, she was found dead in her apartment. Her postmortem reports revealed that she had died due to slow starvation. It was the most sudden and shocking news as she had died two days prior and had nobody by her side during her last days.

Real life inspired the reel

With so much happening in her life, Mahesh Bhatt decided to make a movie based on their tragic love story and in the year 1982, he made the movie 'Arth' starring Shabana Azmi, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Smita Patil in lead roles. The movie catapulted Mahesh Bhatt to fame and he earned recognition as a director. The movie was inspired on the life of Parveen Babi and as soon as she got an inkling of this, she became all the more aggressive and slowly started isolating herself from Bollywood. She even went to the US for her treatment but it didn't help either and she returned back, overweight and quite different from her normal self.

Shocking claims by Parveen Babi

Parveen slowly started imagining unreal things and also started believing that eminent personalities were trying to kill her. In fact, she even accused megastar Amitabh Bachchan of trying to kill her, which of course wasn't true. Because of her deadly claims, she was getting alienated from Bollywood and she started leading a life in isolation. Her relationship with Mahesh Bhatt also came to an end, owing to her illness.

Parveen’s fight with her illness and approaching cracks in her relationship

Everything seemed normal until the unfateful evening in 1979. Mahesh Bhatt who was living in with Parveen at the time returned home to see a traumatized and disturbed Parveen in a film costume with a knife in her hand. She was hurled in a corner of her house and said the words, "Don't talk! The room is bugged. They're trying to kill me." This was the first time that Parveen had behaved in such a deranged manner. It was of course the beginning of a downfall. It was soon discovered that Parveen was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Cracks started surfacing in their relationship and Parveen started slowly drowning herself away from everyone.

Heartwarming love tale of Parveen Babi and Mahesh Bhatt

Parveen Babi's professional life was going great but her love life wasn't as rosy. After dating quite a few men from the industry like Kabir Bedi and Danny Denzongpa, Parveen started seeing the married director Mahesh Bhatt. Theirs was an unusual love story because he was already married at the time. He was just a struggling filmmaker while Parveen was a reigning diva and their love story began in yhe year 1977. Everything seemed perfect in the beginning. But later, everything just shattered. After being diagnosed by paranoid schizophrenia, apparently Bhatt's life had become a living hell. In one of his interviews, he has said that there was a time when a stalk naked Parveen ran after him.

Interesting love life

After getting acclaim as an established actress, Parveen was content professionally, but her personal life started gaining equal attention. She dated quite a few men from Bollywood like Danny Denzongpa, Kabir Bedi and Mahesh Bhatt.

Rise in Bollywood

Starting out as a model, Parveen Babi landed her first Bollywood movie 'Charitra' opposite cricketer Salim Durani in the year 1973 which unfortunately bombed at the box office, but she got noticed for her performance in the movie. Her first commercial hit movie was 'Deewar' in the year 1975 opposite Amitabh Bachchan. She followed it up with movies like 'Amar Akbar Anthony', 'Kranti' and she became a part of the big league of actresses in Bollywood.