Leads to Widowhood at 34: Shanti Priya Reflects on Marriage to 'Baazigar' Star Siddharth Ray and Stepping Away From Acting

Shanti Priya who did many films in Telugu, Tamil before she made her Hindi cinema debut with Akshay Kumar in 1991, left the industry as soon as she got married. The actress fell in love with 'Baazigar' actor Siddharth Ray and tied the knot in 1992. Post which she left cinema and acting to start a new, simple life with him. Shanti Priya was just 24 when she got married and her mother also had warned her against it because she was doing well in her career. But she chose love over acting. They were happily married but Siddharth's untimely demise due to heart attack was tragic. He passed away in 2004 when she was just 34 and left her with two children. In a recent interview, Shanti Priya has opened up on her decision to leave movies as she got married. She told Screen, "I just got married and I wanted to enjoy my married life. I wanted to give my best to it. Bombay was completely a new place for me and I was from South India and he was a mix of Maharashtra and Bengal, so I wanted to learn all that and give my all to it. It wasn’t ever like they asked me to stop acting or such.”Recalling the tragic moment when Siddharth passed away, Shanti Priya said, "It was shocking. It was evening… dinner time. As usual he was performing his fatherly duties. He was teaching something about importance of sharing to my younger son. We were all at the dinner table. Me, him and our two sons when he suddenly had a hiccup and he dropped his head."She added further, "For him, it was beautiful but for us, it is unforgettable moment. I couldn’t think or do anything. It was my first time seeing someone having a heart attack. My maid came, she tried a couple of things to bring him back to life. We had a doctor staying upstairs, we called him. Somehow, we put him on the sofa. He tried all kind of things, injected something, but we couldn’t revive him. The doctors declared him dead. I was stuck. I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t know whether to express my feelings or to take over the responsibilities.”This incident changed her life as she was a widow and had to be a single mother to raise her children. She said, "I was off colours. I only wore white. I had some kind of things going on in my head. One day, when my mother came to me, she was shocked to see me like that. Looking at my kids, she yelled at me for behaving like living dead. She said: ‘Do you think your kids deserve this? You are the only parent they have. I was uneducated and single mother and yet managed to give good life to you and your siblings, in your case, you are financially strong, independent and educated.’ This hit me hard. This brought me back to my senses. It was then I pulled myself, looked at my children and said, ‘they don’t deserve this.'" Earlier in an interview with Times Of India, the actress had said, “It wasn't fair that they lost one parent and then had to see the other parent deal with depression. So, I told myself, 'This is not who I should be and this is not what I should give my sons because they don't deserve what they're seeing'. I worked on myself again. I decided to give them the best and then I worked on it and I came out of it.”