Mahanati, the biopic on the legendary actor Savitri, released to both critical acclaim and commercial success. The film threw light on Savitri’s life as an actor and her relationship with her husband and actor Gemini Ganesan, a legend in his own right.

While there have been various controversies about the film with Gemini’s daughter through his first wife Alamelu, Dr Kamala Selvaraj claiming that her father was shown in poor light, the makers have now released a deleted scene from the film which shows Rekha and her mother Pushpavalli meeting Savitri and her daughter Vijaya Chamundeswari at their residence during the Navratri pooja. It is well known that Gemini was in a relationship with Pushpavalli when he was married to both Alamelu and Savitri and had two children out of it.

In an interview with Simi Garewal, Rekha, when asked about her father, had said, “If you don’t taste something, you don’t know what it means. I didn’t know what the word “father” meant.” When Khalid Mohammed interviewed her in 2015, her perspective about her father seemed to have changed slightly as she said, “I adored my father but there was a distance which could never be covered. My father (Gemini Ganesan) wrote poetry fluidly, he was a man of literature. As an actor, he was a heartthrob for decades.”