When Madhubala was labelled, 'The Biggest Star in the World – and she’s not in Beverly Hills' by an American magazine.
The following is an extract from the article in the August 1952 issue of Theatre Art by David Cort.
-------
The actress with the greatest following, in numbers and devotion, is not to be found in Hollywood, but on the opposite side of the planet — in Bombay, India.
Her name is Madhubala. She is nineteen years old, a small girl with arching eyebrows and a shy, sweet smile, who has risen to the top of the Indian movie industry in the last two years.
Madhubala’s local audience is taken from the 420,000,000 people of India and Pakistan (about the population of the United States and all western Europe combined). Her pictures have also a lively export market in Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and East Africa. In India alone, the movie theatres take in 75,000,000 paid admissions a month, at prices as low as three cents a ticket.
On an average, since she first became a star, Madhubala has completed four pictures a year and at one point early this year was under contract to make as many as nine for various producers — working on two or three at the same time.
She is the highest paid star in her industry, and her industry is fast catching up with the biggest.
India now produces nearly 300 feature pictures a year, as against Hollywood’s 450. About a dozen of India’s films in any year will star Madhubala. A single issue of a movie magazine will run a slew of advertisements, reviews and pictures of Madhubala. And both she and the Indian movie industry can justly claim that they have hardly started.
American ignorance of Madhubala is understandable. For one thing, the riotous movie boom in India dates only from around 1943. For another, Madhubala’s ascendancy is only two years old, and she herself is a new phenomenon in the eastern world.
The story of India for the past ten years may be condensed as: The war, the movie boom, independence, and Madhubala. Independence and Madhubala seem to go together, for reasons that may seem baffling to westerners. It may help to explain what India looks for in a beautiful woman. It does not, of course, want a blonde. The invariable attributes of an Indian actress are large, languishing brown eyes, a full-lipped mouth and an aquiline nose. India’s former stars had these, but they were usually generously padded ladies given to overacting.