Sridevi was ‘a pioneer and an inspiration’, says Google CEO Sundar Pichai

Sridevi died due to accidental drowning in a Dubai hotel on February 24. She was there to attend her nephew’s wedding.

Like millions of her fans, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was also enamoured by late actor Sridevi’s performances. On Friday, Pichai tweeted, recalling Sridevi’s top class act in 1983 film Sadma.

Sridevi was probably the first female superstar of Hindi cinema.

He wrote, “Her performance in Sadma was one of my favorites and have special memories of watching Sridevi with my family. She was a pioneer and an inspiration to so many of us. So very sorry for your tragic loss and may she RIP.”

Sridevi died due to accidental drowning in a Dubai hotel on February 24. She was there to attend her nephew’s wedding.

Sridevi, who used only one name onscreen, began her film career as a child actor and went on to star in many Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films, before making her Bollywood debut in the late 1970s.

By the late 1980s, she was a name to reckon with in mainstream Hindi-language films and was able to command top billing. She managed to dominate screen space in a film industry where the heroine’s role was largely relegated to a few songs and a handful of romantic scenes as the leading man’s love interest.

Despite a life spent entirely in the movie business, colleagues described Sridevi as quiet and shy on the sets until she faced the camera, when several of them recalled how she would “transform” into the character she was playing.

In 1997, she married Boney Kapoor, a producer on many of her films, and stepped away from cinema for many years to raise her two daughters.