Vara(a)

That's Varalakshmi, Sarathkumar's daughter from his first marriage, who was introduced to the world at the recent Filmfare awards function. Varalakshmi apparently has a Ph.D in Microbiology and an M.Sc in management from the Edinburgh University in Scotland. But she was probably bitten by the acting bug since she also did a six-month acting course at Anupam Kher's 'Actor Prepares' academy in Mumbai. With that behind her, she is going to be Simbhu's heroine in Podaa Podi, whose creative promo photos caught my eye recently(now we know why the hero and heroine had their faces covered in all those photos. The heroine hadn't been picked yet!)

I wonder if this is the first time we are seeing the daughter of a big star enter the Tamil filmworld. Star sons are ofcourse nothing new. We have seen sons of actors(Prabhu, Karthik, Surya, Sibi) and even sons of producers('Jayam' Ravi, Jeeva) and directors(Vijay, Simbhu) make it big. But I can't think of any leading actresses who are the daughters of someone famous (I can think of only two actresses Sruthika(Thengai Srinivasan's granddaughter) and Abinayasri(Anuradha's daughter) with links to the film industry). Wonder if it is because people in the cine world know how the industry treats women and so want to keep their daughters out of it.

As Sarath's daughter, Varalakshmi's debut will certainly be a high-profile one(her only competition would've been Shruti Hassan but with her movie with Maddy scrapped, its not sure when we'll see her on the big screen). She is certainly good-looking. And Sify calls her "beautiful, tall, attractive and articulate, with style and élan to be a movie star". But we've recently seen actresses like Vimala Raman(Poi) and Nethra(Thoovaanam) who fit the same description but couldn't make it big(atleast so far). Gotta wait and see what awaits Varalakshmi.