Achala Sachdev

Early life

Sachdev was born in Peshawar in 1920.

Career

Achala worked for All India Radio, Lahore before Indian partition and then at Delhi All India Radio. Achala made her film debut with Fashionable Wife (1938), and acted in over 130 Hindi films. She has acted in many Yash Raj Films, starting with Yash Chopra's first production Daag: A Poem of Love (1973) and films like Chandni (1989) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Her other noted films were Prem Pujari, Mera Naam Joker, Hare Rama Hare Krishna and Andaz, apart from acting in English films like the Mark Robson's Nine Hours to Rama (1963) and Merchant Ivory's The Householder (1963). However her most noted role remained of as Balraj Sahani's wife in the Waqt (1965), where in the hit song Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen was picturised with her.

Personal life

Well before becoming an actress, Achala was married to Gian Sachdev, who worked intermittently as an assistant director in Bollywood. They had at least one son, Jyotin, who is a business consultant living in the USA. They were estranged for many years.

Achala became a resident of Pune after marrying Clifford Douglas Peters who had a factory in Pune's Bhosari industrial estate named Morris Electronics, producing small electronics parts like diodes. The factory was later sold to Piramal Group. In an almost filmy turn, Sachdev was introduced to Peters by Yash Chopra on the sets of a film in Mumbai. Peter's first wife had died by then and Sachdev herself was a divorcee. They married. Peters, a mechanical engineer, had a factory in Bhosari and the couple lived in a bungalow in the same area for a while before shifting to Hadapsar. After Peters died, Achala lived alone. Five years before her death, she gave away her flat in Pune to the Janseva Foundation, a charitable organization, on condition that they should take care of her as long as she lived.

In September 2011, Achala slipped and fell in her kitchen. She sustained a fracture in her leg. After that, she was diagnosed with multiple emboli in her brain. This resulted in total paralysis and the loss of her vision. She was survived by son Jyotin.