How Many Nose jobs Did Priyanka Chopra have?

PRIYANKA CHOPRA

Desi girl' Priyanka Chopra is on her way to global domination. Whether it is Miss World or the hearts of fans, Priyanka has always been a winner, and fought her way to the top, despite having no 'godfather' in Bollywood.

However, botched up plastic surgery almost threatened to end her career even before it began, if an excerpt published by Scroll.in from her yet-to-be-released biography, Priyanka Chopra: The Dark Horse, is to be believed.

Priyanka was gearing up to make a grand debut opposite Bobby Deol, in a film directed by Mahesh Manjrekar and produced by Vijay Galani. Right before the film was about to take off, she got a nose job, which threw everything off track.

Vijay revealed, "She'd just had some nasal surgery done in London where the bridge of her nose had collapsed. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I had a little bit of shooting here in Film City and then a long schedule planned in London. How could we shoot with the heroine's nose looking the way it did?"

The actress herself was unfazed, he said, adding, "She was absolutely confident that it was a temporary situation and that the nose would settle down in a month's time, definitely by the time we left for London."

It was decided by the makers that the first schedule in Film City would be managed using long shots. However, things only went south after a month. The nose was still a problem, and the director's market value had plummetted, after he delivered one flop after another. Bobby, too, was not too comfortable with Priyanka's nose and opted out, promising to adjust the money he had already been paid against another film.

Subsequently, Priyanka was dropped like a hot potato from the projects she had signed. Her former manager Prakash Jaju had to plead with filmmaker Anil Sharma, to retain her in The Hero: Love Story of a Spy. Apparently, he relented, but relegated her to a smaller role than before.

Anil, however, begs to differ. "That's a fake story. When I signed her for The Hero, I didn't have a script ready. We were only sure that Sunny Deol would play the title role, nothing else was finalised. When Priyanka was signed, it was talked of as a Sunny-Priyanka film. But the script hadn't been written and when it was, it happened to have two girls in it, both opposite Sunny. Preity played one role, Priyanka the other," he clarified.

The filmmaker headed to US and Canada for three or four months, before developing the script. When he returned, he heard whispers that Priyanka got a lip job.

"I began to hear that she'd had some surgery done, that she wanted pouting lips like Julia Roberts. I hadn't met her for a while because after my first few meetings with her, I was confident that she would be a very good actress, I knew that I wouldn't have to slog over her performance," he said.

On his return, Anil got a rude shock when a producer revealed that Priyanka had been dropped from a bunch of films. "He also put a photograph before me. Of a girl in a bathing suit coming out of the pool. I told him, 'This is not Priyanka, this is someone else. This girl is really awful looking while Priyanka is a pretty girl with a beautiful smile.' He insisted that the girl in the photograph was Priyanka. I was shocked, so I called her and she came to meet me with her mother," he said.

"When I looked at her, I burst out angrily and asked her, 'Where was the need to do all this?' Mother and daughter got very emotional at this meeting and they explained that she'd had surgery done, it would take six to seven months for the nose to heal. Since she'd been dropped from three or four other films, they were going back to Bareilly and they returned my cheque to me," Anil revealed.

Something made him stop them from leaving. "I was also emotionally moved. So I told them not to return to Bareilly right away. I told them that I'd do a screen test with her. I called Pandhari dada (veteran makeup man), sent for cinematographer Kabir Lalji, decided on her look with short hair and took a screen test. She was determined, unmein kshamta thi (she had the ability), that's why she succeeded. As a filmmaker, I had only the small role of presenting her on the screen in the right way," he said.

Eventually, The Hero: Love Story of a Spy was Priyanka's launch vehicle in Bollywood. And there was no looking back for her.