Malayalam actress Kalpana, 51, dies

National Award-winning Malayalam actress Kalpana, who had enlivened the screen for over three decades with her guileless brand of humour, passed away in Hyderabad on Monday. A heart attack is said to be the cause. She was 51 years old.

She is survived by daughter Sreemayi, mother Vijayalakshmi and two sisters, Kalaranjini and Urvashi. She had acted in 300-odd films, most of which were comic roles. She won the National Award for best supporting actress in 2013 for her portrayal of Muslim social worker Razia Beevi in Njan Thanichalla. Kalpana was found unconscious in her hotel room on Monday. She had reportedly reached Hyderabad on January 24 for the shoot of her bilingual Telugu/Tamil film Oopiri starring Nagarjuna and Karthi. “She was supposed to come for the shoot on Monday morning but didn’t turn up. When the unit staff went to her room to check, she was unconscious and they immediately shifted her to a nearby hospital, where the doctors certified her brought dead,” a unit source said.

Associates say that Kalpana had been suffering from heart valve-related problems for which she was undergoing treatment at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi. Among her sisters, she was the first to act in films. She began as a child artiste in films like Vidarunna Mottukal and Dwik Vijayam, and went on to don emotionally dense roles in Sivan’s Yagam (1982) and M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Manju (1983).