Silk Smitha

Silk Smitha was an Indian film actress. She became a movie extra and subsequently the most wanted heroine of the early 80s. The sobriquet "Silk" came in 1979, with her first Tamil film Vandi Chakkaram, in which she played a bar girl named Silk. In a career spanning 17 years, she did over 450 films in Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi languages. Born as Vijayalakshmi, in a poor family in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, Smitha left school after her fourth standard due to financial constraints. Due to her good looks, she was ‘exploited’ by men, thus her family married her off at a very young age. But when she started getting ill-treated by her husband and in-laws, she ran away to Madras (now known as Chennai) and started living with an aunt.