Actress. She shall be remembered as one of the first Indian performers to portray strong female leads. Raised in what was then called Ceylon, she moved to the southern Indian province of Kerala at around 14. Sujatha made her silver screen bow with the 1968 Malayamam language “Thapsvini” then caught the attention of noted Tamil director K. Balachander with 1971’s “Ernakulam Junction”. Over her career she was to appear in around 300 feature films, roughly 200 of them in Tamil with the remainder variously in Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi. Sujatha’s major break came with her portrayal of Kavitha, a young woman forced to assume family leadership and financial responsibilities, in Balachander’s 1974 black-and-white classic “She’s a Never Ending Story”. Thru the 1970s she earned praise with a number of roles including Annam in the 1976 Malayalam “Annakili”, Anu in 1977’s “Avargal”, the story of a young girl who loses a boyfriend with her father’s job transfer, marries and divorces a sadistic and jealous man, then ends up with conflicted feelings as three men including the ex-husband and ex-boyfriend try to woo her, and the 1979 “Nool Veli” in which she played an author and government censor. Thru the 1980s Sujatha gradually assumed the ‘mother’ parts that distinguished the remainder of her time before the public. She was a recipient of the Kerala government’s Kalaimamani Award given to honor service to the arts. Sujatha earned her final screen credits in 2006 with “Vathiyar” and “Sri Ramadasu” and died after an extended battle with cardiac disease. (bio by: Bob Hufford)