When Dharmendra stopped Hema Malini’s wedding to Jeetendra; What happened next?

Do you know? Bollywood’s dream girl, Hema Malini was once getting married to her frequent co-star Jeetendra, when her now-husband Dharmendra barged in to stop the wedding.

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One of the most prominent female actors in the Indian film industry in the 1970s, Hema Malini tied the knot with much older-than-her superstar Dharmendra in 1980, while he was already married to Prakash Kaur. The two became parents to two daughters, Esha and Ahana Deol.

However, what many might know, is that Malini was once all set to wed his frequent co-star and iconic actor Jeetendra, although neither of the two was in love with each other.

According to the details, despite Malini and Dharmendra being madly in love with each other, her parents, Jaya Chakravarthy and V.S. Ramanujam Chakravarthy were against their union and tried their best to get their daughter married to someone else.

For this, they convinced the ‘Sholay’ actor to meet the parents of her ‘Waris’ co-star, who liked her for their son and both the families took off to Madras for their wedding.

“I don’t want to marry Hema. I am not in love with her. She is not in love with me. But my family wants it, so I might as well. And she is such a good girl,” Jeetendra had told his friend once.

Although the marriage was kept secret with all the preparations, a magazine got to know about it and published the story, leaking it to their then-respective-partners, Dharmendra and Shobha Sippy, who decided to fly to Madras to crash the wedding.

“Why don’t you get out of my daughter’s life? You are a married man, you can’t marry my daughter,” her father had told Dharmendra when he reached the venue to stop the wedding.

After the clash with his father, Dharmendra met Malini in her room and convinced her not to make the ‘mistake’ of marrying someone else. She asked for some time from her and Jeetendra’s families, but her then-to-be-in-laws rejected and left the venue.

However, this didn’t lead to their marriage on the same day and their love story had more ‘possessiveness’ and suffocation’ to follow, as noted by Malini in her biography. More restrictions, alcoholism, films and insecurities later, Dharmendra eventually married Hema Malini on May 2, 1980.

In an earlier interview, the veteran had revealed that her husband never sang praises or was in awe of her beauty, just like her mother, and she was wooed by this ‘simplicity’ and ‘sincerity’ of him.

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