How Sridevi's personal tragedy halted production of Lamhe back in 1990: Yash Chopra, "Sridevi is the Best Actor I've worked with"

Excerpt:

Yash Chopra, "After Sri's father died, I experienced the most traumatic time in my life. That was a terrible time for all of us. I couldn't bring myself to break the news to her. After I got the call, I went to her room and told her that her father was very sick and that she had to leave for Bombay immediately. She started weeping. She must have had an intuition. To compound our troubles we were shooting outside Manchester which is a few hundred miles outside London. Weeping continuously Sri caught the inter-linking flight and finally made it to Bombay. Those were the most tension filled days of my whole career. I didn't know what to do. As a producer I could incur lakhs of losses. But I knew Sridevi' professionalism. And I relied on that. And true to form, as soon as the 15th day rites were over, Sri caught the plane for London - on the 16th day itself! And that too all alone.

On the very first day after the incident, she had to shoot a comedy scene with Waheedaji (who'd been sitting idle for the whole of that fortnight and wanted to go back to India to her children). Main bhi dar raha tha (I was afraid to ask her to do the comedy scene). I was very hesitant, very apprehensive about asking her to do such a sequence. But Sri immediately put my doubts to rest. "Yashji I've come here to work," she assured me with quiet strength. And went ahead and did the scene full throttle. She even added to the scene with several improvisations. I was left amazed. How could she do it? Especially when I knew that after shooting, she'd go to her room, put the pictures of her parents on her dressing table and cry her heart out. That girl is something else." 

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 "I was as disheartened by the failure of Lamhe, which was romantic. I had a right to feel bad. After Lamhe didn’t click, I couldn’t work for six months. Anyway, I’ve never believed in striking up a huge quantity of work. I direct a film when something inside tells me to. Perhaps my failures were ahead of their times. Otherwise how can you explain the fact that the highest sales of my DVDs have been of Dharmputra, Silisila and Lamhe?" 

 -- Yash Chopra. 

 From Romance Ho Jaye.