Soni Razdan says ‘dyed my hair black’ to fit into Shyam Benegal’s Smita-Shabana prototype | Bollywood News
2 min readMumbaiJul 8, 2026 08:18 AM IST Soni Razdan was among a long list of talented and accomplished women actors in the 1970s and 1980s who barely got the chance to play the lead in a film directed by late legendary filmmaker Shyam Benegal, who died a couple of years ago. Others included Deepti Naval, Ratna Pathak, Supriya Pathak, and Neena Gupta, who despite being key members of India’s parallel cinema movement, didn’t get to do enough work with Benegal, the leader of that movement. The filmmaker was largely fixated on Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil as his choice of the leading lady. Soni admits that given she was the daughter of a German mother, her chances were slim to begin with. “The way I looked, especially in those days, was a complete anomaly to the Smita-Shabana prototype. I guess that was what he wanted,” she tells SCREEN. But that doesn’t mean she never tried. “I remember I dyed my hair black so that I could look more like that, but he didn’t think …
