The Natya Peroli (radiant light of dance) of the Tamil film industry is no more. Actress Padmini, who made a mark on celluloid as a dancer and among the first heroines of the industry, died last night at a city hospital following a heart attack. She was 74.

Padmini earned the sobriquet ‘Natya Peroli’ for her impressive skills as a Bharatnatyam dancer and captivated audiences in India and abroad with her films many of which featured her dances with a classical core. Her son, Prem Ramachandran, lives in New Jersey in the US, with whom she had stayed for several years, running a classical dance school, before returning to Chennai in August 2006 for good.

Only the evening before her death, the actress had attended an extravagant public function in the city despite her ill-health and got up to felicitate Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, himself a well-known script writer, for his contribution to the film industry.

Introduced to the film world by the legendary Uday Shanker, who saw her performance when she was 14, the doe-eyed, pretty actress first acted in a Hindi film Kalpana (1949) when she was barely 17. Her first Tamil film Manamagal (Bride) came a year later. She went on to act in more than 250 films in Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu and Kannada, in a versatile film career that lasted more than two decades.

Padmini, along with her sisters Lalitha and Ragini, also Bharatanatyam dancers, came to be known as the famous ‘Travancore sisters’ hailing as they did from Poojapura in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala. But it was Padmini among the trio who achieved greater fame as an actress. Born to landlord Thankappan Pillai and Saraswati Amma, Padmini learnt dance along with her sisters when she was four under teachers Guru Gopinath and T M Mahalingam Pillai.

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