Madhur Jaffrey, ‘the lovely lady who teaches us Indian cookery on television and in books,’ was a Rada-trained actor before becoming a ‘household name’, writes Janet Watts in the Observer Magazine on 9 January 1983. Now she is resuming her acting career in James Ivory’s latest film, Heat and Dust. She plays the wicked old Begum, manipulative mother to the Nawab (played by Shashi Kapoor)who makes ‘a dishonest woman of a ravishing English rose’ (played by Greta Scacchi).
‘I was always a rebel,’ she tells Watts from her New York home. Born into an ‘upper-upper-middle-class’ family, her matriarch grandmother ruled the women in the Delhi household ‘like a boss’. Women and, Jaffrey later realised, men too, were oppressed. ‘Everything in her birthright,’ writes Watts, ‘gave her claustrophobia.’
