MUMBAI: The actress Sonali Bendre, who currently judges dance reality shows on television, recently acknowledged that when she first entered the business, she had no formal training in the art form. She described how Saroj Khan, the movie's choreographer, "was ready to kill" her when they were filming English Babu Desi Mem starring Shah Rukh Khan. She also talked candidly about how she was cast in Mani Ratnam's Bombay, which included the legendary song "Humma Humma," which went on to become one of the most well-known dance numbers of the decade.

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Sonali revealed she had nightmares due to the dance numbers in her movies saying, “It is ironical. I am not a trained dancer. I am not a trained actor. I have never done theatre. So songs, shooting for a song was a nightmare for me. I went through sleepless nights. I would get acidity because of the stress I was going through. I was always scared of songs. Can you imagine my career is based on songs. Even if the movie has not done well, I have done well only because of the songs that I was featured in have done well. They have not all been dance numbers, My first song was ‘Sambhala Hai Maine…’ it was just walking, and it was just expression… It’s the songs that have carried me through.”

Speaking of Her film English Babu Desi Mem, Sonali revealed, “I had done English Babu Desi Mem where Saroj Khan was ready to kill me because I couldn’t dance, and I was playing a bar dancer. Can you imagine what she was going through? I was struggling. Every hour I wasn’t working, I was trying to learn how to dance and Ahmed (Khan) was Saroj ji’s assistant at that time and I remember how he would bribe me with chocolates and ice-cream, he would pick me up from my home in Lokhandwala (Andheri, Mumbai), take me to a rehearsal hall and he would teach me. I was like. ‘I can’t do it, I am fed up,’ and he would say, ‘Come on, just one step, just once more. This is the chocolate, this is the ice cream’. He would literally bribe me, like a little child.”

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Sonali spoke about doing Humma Humma in mani Ratnam’s Bombay saying, “It was not shot in Bombay, it was shot in Chennai. It was a Mani Ratnam film. Actually, I felt bad that I didn’t have the movie, just one song… There was an equal amount of people saying that I shouldn’t be doing it, or I should be doing it. And I said it’s ok, I get to learn something and that time the challenge in front of me was that I couldn’t dance.”

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Credit-IndianExpress