Bollywood’s forgotten Zohra Jabeen who died alone after 12 years in isolation

Achala Sachdev’s name once shone alongside Bollywood’s biggest — Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Yash Chopra, Rajesh Khanna. Her smile graced timeless frames, from the tender strains of Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen in Waqt to the warm grandmotherly presence in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. She appeared in over 250 films, spanning from the 1950s to the early 2000s, her career bookended by Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.

But when the lights dimmed, the applause faded — and so did the people. For 12 long years in her Pune apartment, Sachdev lived alone, cared for only by an attendant. Her two children stayed away: her son in the US kept contact to the occasional phone call, while her daughter remained estranged. Before she passed in 2012 at age 91, she willed her two-bedroom home to the Janseva Foundation, the NGO she had already supported to create the Achala Sachdev Institute of Education, training youth from tribal areas in healthcare skills.

Born in Peshawar in 1920, she had seen the world — working in pre-Partition Lahore, hosting on All India Radio Delhi, acting in Hindi classics like Mother, Julie, Haqeeqat, Mera Naam Joker, Himalay Ki God Mein, and even crossing over to international cinema with Nine Hours to Rama and Merchant-Ivory’s The Householder. Her career soared after Waqt (1965), where Yash Chopra introduced her to her future husband, British engineer Clifford Douglas Peters. After his death in the 1990s, loneliness crept in.

In the end, only a handful came to pay respects — Amitabh Bachchan and Ekta Kapoor offered public tributes, her son flew in for the funeral. For an actor who gave Bollywood decades of her life, the silence was telling. Her fate mirrored that of other legends — O.P. Nayyar, Bharat Bhushan, Bhagwan Dada — artists who gave the industry its magic, only to be forgotten when the curtain fell.