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What set Nutan apart from other actresses of her time was that she was a thinking actress who tried to fathom the inchoate motivations of the characters she played. She could convey much more with just a look or fleeting glance than most could even with expansive dialogue. In fact Lata Mangeshkar has singled her out as the heroine whose expressions came closest to suggest she was genuinely singing the song herself!
Nutan, the daughter of actress Shobhana Samarth, grew up full of complexes. Though renowned for her beauty later, she was dismissed by unfeeling relatives as skinny and ugly. Undeterred, Shobana Samarth launched her in Humari Beti (1950). Hum Log (1951) and Nagina (1951) both proved popular but Nutan got her major breakthrough and respectability as an actress par excellence with Seema (1955) where she played a delinquent in a reform home. It was a powerhouse performance and won her the Filmfare Award for Best Actress.
Subsequently whether it was the lighthearted Paying Guest (1957), or Dilli ka Thug (1958), where she performed with a frothy uninhibitedness comparable only to Madhubala, or Bimal Roy's intense Sujatha (1959), which brought out the best in her as an artiste, Nutan was always matchless.
In 1959 Nutan married Naval Lieutenant Commander Rajneesh Behl and took a small break when her son Mohnish was born. She made a stinging comeback with Navketan's Tere Ghar ke Saamne (1963), a refreshing romantic comedy and Bimal Roy's Bandini (1963) boasting of possibly her greatest ever performance and certainly one of the greatest performances of Indian Cinema. The film tells the story of a woman prisoner charged with murder. Totally devoid of highly charged emotion and theatrics, Nutan appears as a quiet woman with her passions raging from within her and plays her role with great delicacy and dignity. One just has to see the entire gamut of emotions fleeting across her face in the film's key sequence as she murders her lover's wife. It is a masterful performance by an artiste supreme.
Nutan's career shone bright right through the 1960s and 1970s with strong performances in films like Milan (1967), Saraswatichandra (1968), Saudagar (1973), Sajan Bina Suhagan (1978), Kasturi (1978) and Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki (1978). She carries the last film entirely on her shoulders even though the sympathy is with the mistress rather than the wife, (Nutan).
Gradually, she began being saddled with mundane mother roles and barring Meri Jung (1985) none of her later films even remotely offered her any histrionic challenges.
Even as she continued to act, her diary farm, her bhajan singing (she was actually blessed with a fine singing voice and did her own playback in Chabili (1960)) and her search for spirituality took up her time. When she died of cancer in 1991, Indian Cinema had lost one of its greatest performers.
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