Imagine Urvashi is on the screen and you choose that exact moment to bend down and tie your shoe-strings, turn around to shoo a fly, or even blink for a second too long. In that moment you might just miss one of the best acting moments in cinema, such is the actor's mastery over detailing, over subtleties. It might have been a flicker of her eye or else a smile that grew too wide, but Urvashi would have transitioned from friend to foe or happy to sad in that moment. Now, with the abundance of compliments flowing her way for Ullozhukku, her latest release, seasoned lovers of Malayalam cinema can sit back and pronounce, we knew it all along.

We did. A line asking for the biggest fans of Urvashi in my otherwise unpopular social media page brought dozens of responses. This in itself need not be extraordinary, actors have always had fans. So one would need some perspective to understand why it stands out. Urvashi came to act as a child at the turn of 1980, just when Mammootty and Mohanlal, the biggest stars of Malayalam cinema today, were making their debut. In about three years, by the age of 13, she played the female lead in Bhagyaraj’s Tamil drama Mundhanai Mudichu (1983). For the next 10 to 12 years, she crossed between Malayalam and Tamil and played numerous characters, etching lines and expressions in the minds of her fans. She kept proving herself with every passing film, widening her range, never limiting herself to a particular kind of role or emotion, and letting in awards after awards – including three consecutive Kerala state awards (1989-91). 

Towards the late 1990s and at the turn of the century, she reduced the number of films she acted in, appearing infrequently in a few Tamil films including Kamal Haasan ones. Achuvinte Amma – about a mother and a grownup daughter – became a much awaited comeback film in Malayalam in 2005, followed by another award winning performance in Madhuchandralekha the next year. 

Veteran filmmaker Sathyan Anthikad says that when the story of Achuvinte Amma came to his mind, he had immediately thought of Urvashi and Meera Jasmine. "When I met her to tell her the story, I told her it was not the role of a glamorous heroine, that she’d be playing Meera Jasmine’s mother. Without batting an eyelid she told me that if it was my movie, she’d even play the mother of Sukumari chechi.” Sukumari, who passed away a decade ago, was one of the most senior and revered actors of the time.

Sathyan Anthikad has made some of Urvashi’s best movies of all times, including Thalayanamanthram which Malayalis cite to this day as one of the best family dramas.

If she won a state award for Thalayanamanthram for best female actor (1990), she won the national award for best supporting actor (female) for Achuvinte Amma. But it did not exactly take her to the top spot again. Urvashi, being the admirably flexible actor that she is, seemed happy playing minor but noticeable (and often hilarious) roles as the years ticked by, and occasionally proving her mettle with a powerful character, like in Mummy & Me (2010) or Ente Ummante Peru (2018), and now Ullozhukku. 

That is the perspective that you need to understand why the acceptance of Ullozhukku matters. Great women actors in Malayalam always had seasons, or ‘peak times’. After this they either voluntarily left the scene or appeared to be forgotten or sidelined because of their ‘age’. 

‘Her graph never goes down’

“But Urvashi’s graph just never goes down,” says Anupama Mili, a journalist and admirer of the actor. “I mean, every other actor had a peak time. But she is always on the same level, if not on a higher level than before. And she does no PR, she never proclaims she is the best, she is not a hero’s heroine,” she says, adding that she never misses any of her films. 

By the time Ullozhukku was released, Urvashi had been in the industry for over 40 years. Christo Tomy, the director of the film, says that meeting her and talking to her about the script was like taking a crash course in cinema. “She was very clear about the script, knew what comes where, and she would keep relating parts in the script to experiences in her life. As an artist she can produce magic. I think emotionally it affects her, playing these characters that she might be drawing parallels to with incidents from her life,” Christo says.

Parvathy Thiruvothu and Urvashi play equivalent roles in the film — the give and take between the two actors was highly appreciated among critics and viewers. Fans and people in the industry say in the same voice, you forget everything else when Urvashi is on the screen, playing her Leelama. Christo remembers how for one scene, in which her character has a two-minute monologue about her life, Urvashi who was usually playful before her scenes appeared distant, sitting in a corner, and chanting her lines like a mantra. "When we finished that scene, we could not even clap, we were frozen to the spot. She was just so emotionally charged I could not even think of going for a second take," Christo says.

Early years

Urvashi did not become this inimitably great actor overnight. Although she has always been acclaimed as one of the best in Malayalam, it took her years to master her art.

If you carefully watch her early films, you can spot the growth. She was in her formative years when she was playing the mature ‘Ammu, Thulasi, and Chakki’ to Balachandra Menon and Venu Nagavally in the 1985 film Ente Ammu Ninte Thulasi Avarude Chakki. It was the tune of Malayalam cinema of the time — 14-year-old Shobana played wife in her debut April 18 (1984), teenagers Revathy and Parvathy (actor from the 80s and 90s, not to be confused with Thiruvothu) all entered the field and took up older roles. The saris, the wigs, and the oversized glasses still could not hide the youngness of their faces. 

A budding Urvashi played the vengeful journalist in Nirakkoottu (1985) at 16, the mother of a child in Sunil Vayassu 20 (1986) when she was 17, and a high-school teacher in Deshadanakili Karayarilla the same year. In 1988, when Sathyan Anthikad cast her in Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu as Snehalatha, a bit of a cheat with an eye for gold, he noticed the quick change of her expressions in telling scenes. “I told this to KPAC Lalitha chechi (who played Urvashi's mother in the film) and she noticed it too. Urvashi also proved to be good at humour,” he says.

Humour is a trait she has in common with her two actor sisters Kalaranjini and the late Kalpana. Some of Urvashi’s mannerisms in films can bring to mind the ways of one of these two sisters — especially Kalpana, who had mastered the art of comedy and stood on par with Jagathy Sreekumar, an actor considered to be one of the best in the field. 

A year after Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu, Sathyan Anthikad cast her again in Mazhavilkavadi and she won her first state award for it.

In Mazhavilkavadi, Urvashi played a Malayali girl growing up in Tamil Nadu, innocent and full of selfless love for Velayudhankutty (Jayaram), whose affections lie elsewhere. It was easy to grow fond of her. Along with Mazhavilkavadi, her performance in Varthamana Kalam was also noted for her first state award. It was something of a novelty at the time for a woman to single-handedly drive a movie along as men came and went, playing the villains and heroes of her life. Urvashi’s tragic character of Arundhathi is often without a lot of the emotion you’d expect from a drama, adopting instead a resigned expression of one who has been through too much. 

Thalayanamanthram followed a year later, bringing us Kanchana, perhaps her most unforgettable role as the little-educated homemaker who brews trouble when her brother-in-law brings a wife home and she feels neglected. In a split second, Urvashi switches from the affectionate elder sister-in-law to a nagger whipping insults, while Parvathy playing the brother’s wife looks genuinely surprised. Perhaps, you'd imagine, she too was intrigued by her colleague’s on-the-spot transitions. 

Different faces of Urvashi

Mukesh Kumar, an online film critic, relishes how one gets to keep seeing different faces of Urvashi as an actor. “In Ponmuttayidunna Tharavu, you saw traces of humour. Even in Mazhavil Kavadi and Thalayanamanthram, you saw two different Urvashis. Before all these, I believe, her first striking character in Malayalam came in Sukhamo Devi,” he says.

Urvashi played Sukhamo Devi (1986)’s eponymous ‘Devi’, an immature young woman that Shankar’s character falls in love with. It was the first of a series of movies from actor-director Venu Nagavally that Urvashi would play noticeable roles in. A more striking character came in his film Swagatham (1989), where her character goes through an arc of growth from the playful Fifi to the all-bearing Philomina as life deals her a bad hand.

Mukesh Kumar names another of Venu Nagavally’s characters for Urvashi – Annamma of Lal Salam (1990) – as an unforgettable act. “There is the scene where Annamma, banished from her home for marrying a Communist, comes to see her father’s body when he dies. But the brothers don’t let her. When they finally relent, she goes away crying, ‘I do not want to see him anymore.’ Urvashi outperforms everyone in that scene,” Mukesh says.

Anupama too makes a similar observation about Urvashi’s radical shifts from one character to another — especially, she says, “the ones she’d have absolutely no familiarity with and still manage to own.” 

That’s true, considering Urvashi has played two versions of a daughter-in-law: the abused one in Sthreedhanam (1993), and the indifferent selfish one in Bharya (1994), both opposite Jagadish. Again with him, she played the heroine-cum-antagonist in Injakkadan Mathai & Sons (1993). “Urvashi portrays her characters with ease and has a natural style. She would not even use glycerine in emotional scenes,” says Jagadish, in line with Christo’s observation about emotional scenes affecting her in person.

Urvashi’s voice

It was in the early 1990s that Urvashi began to dub for her characters for the first time. The practice in Malayalam cinema at the time was to mostly use dubbing artists for female actors — the idea being that women should sound a certain way, preferably soft and sweet, deterring actors with deeper voices from using them. 

Scriptwriter Deedi Damodaran, who is also the daughter of renowned writer T Damodaran who scripted many noted Malayalam films, says this was a question she once asked Urvashi, when she appeared in a television programme. “She had used her voice for Inspector Balram, scripted by my father for director IV Sasi. There was a concern at the time that people, not used to hearing her voice, may not accept it. But people did. I asked her why she did not use it before and she said hers was not a ‘conventional’ voice. Dubbing artiste Bhagyalakshmy has spoken about this, how women were expected to sound very submissive, and that if she used a slightly strong voice, she was asked to tone it down,” Deedi says.

It was in the 1991 films Mukha Chithram and Kakkathollayiram that Urvashi’s voice was first used for her characters. In those days, she used a softer near-falsetto, more in line with the ‘accepted’ voice of a woman, not too deep or hardened. “It was in my film Mukha Chithram that she dubbed for the first time. It was my suggestion and she immediately agreed. I thought that the voice of that character (a woman who loses everything when her photo is used in a fake wedding picture) could not be reproduced by someone else. When I saw her act, I knew her graph was very high,” says director Suresh Unnithan, who went on to direct Utsavamelam (1992), the first film that Urvashi wrote the story for. She was a huge help in the characterisation process, he adds. 

Both Mukha Chithram and Kakkathollayiram were listed among the performances that won her the state award for best actor in 1991. Along with them were Kadinjool Kalyanam and Bharatham. Each of these has something outstanding to tell about Urvashi the actor. In Kakkathollayiram, she played a woman with mental disability, convincingly turning into a character who hasn’t outgrown her childhood. Her bit in Kadinjool Kalyanam as a newly married woman treasuring her childhood catches (“my first tooth brush, the dress my mom stitched when I was three, the first stone I threw”) with exaggerated sentiment is still a favourite among many. In Bharatham, she plays the strong cousin to Mohanlal as he suppresses the grief of his brother’s death.

Ammu Sreekumar, an IT professional and Urvashi fan, lists these performances and adds Spadikam (1995) and Kalippattam (1993), two films in which Urvashi acted opposite Mohanlal. Spadikam has a famous drunken song of hers that was quite popular back then. 

“Her character in Vishnulokam (1991) also remains a favourite, although she is not the main female lead in it. Urvashi as Kasthuri in the film still has a place in my heart,” Ammu says.

After her comeback with Achuvinte Amma, Urvashi never had anyone else dub for her. She also let her deep voice flow out freely, not bothering to temper it to suit the ‘meek heroine’ template of an earlier era. It clicked instantly. Urvashi’s cooking instructions in a cute mix of Malayalam and English in Achuvinte Amma are not just funny but too admirably done. 

Women's issues

In the last decade she also briefly appeared as a television host for Jeevitham Sakshi, a family counselling programme. Deedi says that unlike other actors who hosted similar shows, Urvashi would strongly advocate for women’s self-respect, and not prompt them to make allowances endlessly. 

She is yet to make her stand clear about the issues faced by women in the Malayalam industry. Urvashi is not part of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC), formed in the aftermath of the sexual assault of an actor in Kochi in 2017, allegedly masterminded by fellow actor Dileep. But then she has also not been active in the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists (AMMA), the organisation that the WCC fights with for ensuring rights of women. 

She has, however, been vocal about issues such as body shaming being masqueraded as comedy, in her recent interviews for Ullozhukku. 

Every discussion about Urvashi now appears to circle back to Ullozhukku. Her admirers as well as her colleagues quote Ullozhukku as a film that raises Urvashi to another level altogether, among the best in Indian cinema, and even international cinema. “Her roles in the past few years — for every one of those performances, she deserves an award,” says her proud co-actor Jagadish.