Mumbai: Time and tide wait for no man; to that, actress and dancer Jaya Prada may add, neither do politics nor the film industry. The colourful star who once danced to mesmerising numbers around Jeetendra and Rishi Kapoor for Bollywood, and then receded into a career of politics as the MP of Rampur, is returning big-time to Hindi films.

Bollywood had given up on her when, actually, Jaya was secretly longing to do a film that would bring her back to her fans. “People were scared to approach me thinking that I may not be able to give them time,” said the actress, who then started her own production house. A Tamil film with Kamal Haasan called Dashavatar (which will be out in Hindi, too) followed and the Kannada version of Baghban ; also a Bengali film where she plays a strong, fiery character.

Now Jaya will be seen in Sharad Hegde’s Indo-Chinese film The Desire which also stars Shilpa Shetty and Chinese superstar Xia Yu, plus another film by Buddhadeb Dasgupta. “In The Desire, I play Shilpa’s mother who is an Odissi dancer. I’ve waited for more than a decade to do a film like this,” said Jaya, who is the pioneer of the dance ballet form Amrapali. “Actors nowadays have little option to show their Indian classical dancing skills,” she rued, confident that the phase would come back “and actors who got neglected will be able to rise again”.

In her day, of course, actors had to learn classical dancing, how to speak proper Hindi, etc. “But now all this is not needed,” regretted Jaya. “Luckily there are good films being made now and I know that I will get to play strong characters. I’m just waiting for the right roles as I’m too scared to make the wrong move.” Why didn’t she, like her 1980s co-star Jeetendra, then take up television? “It’s time consuming,” replied Jaya, not ruling out the medium at a later date, however.

What about a comeback with other leading men like Amitabh Bachchan or Rishi Kapoor? “Let the storyline be the deciding factor. Now I just want to do different kind of cinema unlike what I had done earlier,” she said.
Source : Indiafm