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Name
Geeta Dutt
Date of Birth
23rd November, 1930
Birth Place
Faridpur, Bengal (Now in Bangladesh)
Father’s Name
Sh.
Debendranath Ghosh Roychoudhury
Mother’s Name
Smt. Amiya Devi
Brother
Mukul Roy (Famous Music Director)
Spouse
Sh. Guru Dutt
Children
Sons - Tarun and Arun
Daughter - Nina
Education
Matriculation
from Private in 1947
She was a Prominent
Indian
Playback Singer
in
Hindi
Movies in the 1950s and 60s, and also a singer of modern
Bengali songs.
There, composer / music director Hanuman Prasad once overheard her singing
casually, and, feeling impressed, he offered to impart her training in
singing. He launched her in a chorus song in Bhakta Prahlad, where she sang
only two lines. But her rendering of those two lines stood out.
Initially, Geeta was a singer known
for singing
bhajans and sad
songs, but her renderings of composer S.D. Burman's
jazzy musical scores in Bazi in 1951 demonstrated a new facet of
Geeta's singing. S.D. Burman recognized the magic in Geeta's voice through
her songs in Do Bhai. He effectively used the Bengali lilt in her
voice in movies like Devdas and Pyasa. Under composer
O.P. Nayyar's
direction, Geeta further developed into a singer who could sing almost any
kind of song, be it soft, snappy, teasing, or sad.
During Geeta's recording of songs
for the movie Baazi, she met the movie's young and upcoming director,
Guru
Dutt. Their romance culminated in marriage on May 26, 1953.
Their marriage was on the rocks, Guru Dutt had got romantically involved
with
Waheeda Rehman,
and Geeta had taken to drinking. The breakup of their marriage affected
Geeta's singing career.
In 1964, Guru Dutt died from a
combination of alcohol and an overdose of sleeping pills. Geeta then
suffered a serious
nervous breakdown,
and also ran into financial problems. She tried to resume her singing
career, cutting discs at
Durga Puja, and
giving stage shows. Geeta died of
cirrhosis of the liver
on July 20, 1972.
She was not the only child in the family. She was one of the ten children
of Debendranath Ghosh Roychoudhury (Ghosh was the surname while Roychoudhury
a title common to several landlords) and Amiya Devi. |
