Veteran National Award-winning actress Surekha Sikri passed away this morning (16th July) in Bombay following a cardiac arrest. She was 75. She had suffered a brain stroke recently and complications arose thereafter, leading to her death. This was her second stroke, the first being in 2020. Two years prior to that, she had suffered a paralytic stroke.
Surekha made her acting debut with Amrit Nahata’s Kissa Kursi Ka. Besides films, she also worked in television serials and theatre. Her roles in Badhaai Ho and TV serial Balika Vadhu in which she played the strict matriarch, Kalyani Devi, won her a lot of appreciation. She won the National Award for the best supporting actress thrice — for Tamas (1988), Mammo (1995) and Badhaai Ho (2018). She went on a wheelchair to receive her National Award in 2018.
To say that Surekha Sikri was a fantastic actress would be to state the obvious. She trained from the National School of Drama (NSD) in 1971. She won the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1989.
