Fearless Nadia: Google celebrates 110th birthday of India’s original stunt queen with a Doodle

Google on Monday celebrated the 110th birthday of actress and stunt queen Mary Ann Evans, popularly known as Fearless Nadia.

‘Fearless’ Nadia was an actress and a stuntwoman from Australia who made her mark in the Hindi film industry by her death-defying acts. She is remembered as the masked, cloaked adventurer in in a 1935 movie 'Hunterwali', in which she played the lead role.

The Doodle showed the illustration of 'Fearless Nadia' wearing a hat.

Nadia was born as Mary Ann Evans on January 8,1908, in Perth, Western Australia. She came to Bombay in 1913 at the age of five with her father.

She learned horse riding, hunting, fishing, and shooting during a stay in the North-West Frontier Province (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). She starred in movies like Desh Deepak and Noor-e-Yaman before getting her big break in Hunterwali.

She had earlier tried her hand at a job in the Army & Navy Store in Bombay as a salesgirl and had at one point wanted to learn "short-hand and typing to get a better job". Astrova’s troupe performed for British soldiers at military bases, for Indian royalty, and for other crowds in small towns and villages. She mastered the art of cartwheels and splits, which came in handy later during her film stunts.

An Armenian fortune teller had foretold that a successful career lay ahead but she would have to choose a name starting with the letter ‘N’. She chose the name Nadia because it was "exotic-sounding".

She toured India as a theatre artist and began working in Zarko Circus in 1930. She was introduced to Hindi films by Jamshed "J.B.H." Wadia who was the founder of Wadia Movietone, the behemoth of stunts and action in 1930s Bombay.

At first, J.B.H. was bemused at Nadia’s insistence on trying out for the movies, but he took a gamble by giving her a cameo as a slave girl (in a hand-painted colour sequence that accentuated her blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes) in the film Desh Deepak, and then as Princess Parizaad in Noor-e-Yaman.

Nadia proved a huge hit with the audience, whereupon, considering her skills at performing circus and other stunts, J.B.H., by then joined by his younger brother Homi, chose to develop her into a star. In 1967-68, when she was in her late 50s, she appeared in a James Bond spoof called Khiladi (The Player).

Fearless Nadia will always be remembered as the original ‘Stunt Queen of India.