BOMBAY, July 16: India’s Bollywood film industry spent Wednesday in mourning for veteran actress Leela Chitnis who passed away early this week in the United States.

Chitnis, 91, died Monday at a nursing home in Danbury, Connecticut.

Beginning in the early 1930s, Chitnis played roles from leading lady to popular actors such as Ashok Kumar, character parts and eventually was typecast as a mother in the latter days of a career that spawned nearly 40 Hindi films.

“She (Chitnis) played my mother in “Awaara” (The Tramp) in 1950 when I was just a child artist and again in my first Hindi film as an adult, Char Deewarein (Four Walls) in 1961,” said Shashi Kapoor, a leading Bollywood personality and heartthrob of the 1970s.

“She was very hard-working and that had not changed a bit in all those years. I never imagined I would work with her as a kid and as an adult, with her playing the same role.”

Chitnis also took her turn behind the camera, directing “Aaj Ki Baat” (The Talk of the Day) and was also one of the first to model for soap brand Lux of Hindustan Lever.

“I have fond memories of her. She played my mother in a lot of pictures. She looked like my mother,” the Press Trust of India quoted veteran actor Dev Anand as saying.

“I used to be a great fan of hers (especially) when she used to act with Ashok Kumar.” A US resident for the last two decades, Chitnis spent her last days in the Connecticut nursing home.—AFP