Movies

Kuldip Kaur, (1927–3 February 1960), was an Indian actress who worked in Hindi and Punjabi films. Known for her roles as negative characters, she was cited as one of Indian cinema's "most polished vamps" and actor Pran's "opposite number". She started her acting career with the first Punjabi film produced in India following Partition; Chaman, also called The Garden in 1948.

Acclaimed as a "vamp" of "exceptional talent" and the "first female villain" in Indian cinema, she has been compared to artists like Shashikala and Bindu. Active from 1948 to 1960, she acted in over 100 films, most of them in Hindi and some in Punjabi. She died in 1960 from tetanus.

Personal life
Kuldip Kaur was born into a Guron Jat family in 1927 in Lahore, Punjab, British India. Her family were Ladhran royal family in Attari, Amritsar District, in Punjab. She was married to Attariwala royal member Mohinder Singh Sidhu, a grandson of the military Commander of Ranjit Singh's army, General Sham Singh Attariwala. Married at the age of fourteen, she became a mother at the age of sixteen.

Kaur defied convention to join films while still in Lahore. She left Lahore in 1947 while communal violence was raging. She was described as a brave lady by Saadat Hasan Manto in his chapter on Kuldip Kaur, titled "Kuldip Kaur: The Punjabi firecracker" in his book Stars from Another Sky: The Bombay Film World of the 1940s. Kaur returned to Lahore in spite of the violence, to pick up Pran's car. His car had been left behind when Pran and she left for Bombay to escape the communal rioting in Lahore following partition of India. She drove the car back alone from Lahore to Bombay, via Delhi.