Madhuri Dixit’s husband, Dr Sriram Nene, has often spoken about not knowing who she was before they tied the knot in 1999. The truth is that Madhuri was inarguably the biggest Bollywood actress of her generation, and she was the peak of her career at that point. But Dr Nene wasn’t interested in considering someone from the film industry as a potential wife, because he’d grown up in Los Angeles and had closely interacted with Hollywood folks. He didn’t have a high opinion of them, but after meeting Madhuri’s brother and liking him, he reconsidered.
Dr Nene recalled the story at a Google Fireside chat around a decade ago. He said, “My folks are from Mumbai. I spoke Marathi, but I didn’t know Hindi. We didn’t watch Hindi movies growing up. The other thing is, I was at UCLA, and we took care of a lot of the Hollywood industry. And I’ll be very candid with you, the industry there is completely crazy. The types of people that you meet… The last thing I want to do is see someone from the film industry. But then, I met her brother. And he was phenomenal and very down-to-earth. He kind of fit our overall mindset. I agreed to meet her, and I probably might’ve googled her back then.”
Asked what his first reaction upon seeing Madhuri in person was, Dr Nene said, “I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know who she was. There’s a couple of points. I grew up in LA, I was surrounded by the industry. What you found is that they put their pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. The connect was that we didn’t treat each other differently, regardless of what our stature was, and what we did. The one thing I loved about her was that she’s down-to-earth, and very straightforward and focused. That’s not always the case in the filmy line. We’re the un-filmy people, in that we’re real, and we like to stay that way.” Madhuri interjected, “He didn’t know what he was getting into.”
Madhuri moved to the United States after marriage, and discovered that she could live like a regular person there. But she returned to the film industry in the mid-2000s. Dr Nene followed in 2011, and the couple has since been living in India. Asked what moving back was like, she said, “It was back to square one. I have to pick and choose where I can be and where I can go. But I do try. After living in Denver and being so independent, when you go back, everything is a little different… I wear my hat or my big gold glares and I feel like this is a proper disguise. But then, somebody will come and whisper in my ear, ‘Can I have an autograph’.”
