RIP Reema Lagoo: The happy opposite of Nirupa Roy’s Bollywood mom

Reema Lagoo died Thursday morning after a cardiac arrest at Kokilaben Hospital in Mumbai.

She played the typical Indian mom in films and popular TV shows and was frequently cast in films starring Salman Khan, including Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, Hum Saath-Saath Hain, and Maine Pyar Kiya. She also played Shah Rukh Khan’s mom in Kal Ho Naa Ho.

Lagoo’s mother was also an actor, the Marathi stage performer Mandakini Bhadbhade, and Lagoo, who was born Gurinder Bhadbhade in 1958, began acting while studying at the Huzurpaga HHCP High School in Pune.

Lagoo grabbed her first big break in 1988 with Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak, starring Aamir Khan and Juhi Chawla. Lagoo played Juhi’s mom. She also worked in the popular television serial Tu Tu Main Main. The only actor cast more often than she in the films of Sooraj Barjatya was Alok Nath.

Unlike the classic Bollywood mom of the 1970s and 80s, Nirupa Roy, Lagoo’s characters were socially well adjusted and mostly happy. Be it Salman’s mom in Hum Saath-Saath Hain or SRK’s mom in Kal Ho Naa Ho, her characters had their own share of struggles and fights, but they were never the weepy, helpless, poor mother that Nirupa Roy often played in her films.

Lagoo was quintessentially the middle- or upper-middle-class Indian woman of her time, a blend of the stereotypical Indian sanskar (culture) and the modern-age attitude that a bad situation can be changed with one’s own deeds. In Vastaav (1999), she was memorably powerful as a mother who kills her own son, played by Sanjay Dutt, after he is driven mad by the burdens of his criminal activities.

She is survived by a daughter from a marriage to the Marathi actor Vivek Lagoo. They later separated. At the time of Lagoo’s death, she had been working in the ongoing TV series, Naamkarann, in which she had taken on the role of a single mom in a story inspired by Mahesh Bhatt’s Zakhm (1998).