Helen walked for 9 months to escape from bombings in Myanmar: ‘I saw blood, skull on the wall as a 3-yr-old; was reduced to a skeleton’ | Bollywood News
Helen, who was famously known as the ‘golden girl’ of Hindi cinema in the 1960s, was famous for her glamorous dance numbers in the movies. For a large part of her career, Helen single-handedly made sure that she added an oomph factor to those ‘cabaret songs’. Such was her presence in the movies that across the 1960s and 1970s, almost every Hindi film that had a dance number in a club, and it featured Helen. Her life looked excessively glamorous but Helen had to literally face starvation to achieve that level of fame and success.
Helen was just three years old when she had to flee her home country Burma (now Myanmar) on foot along with her mother Marlene and younger brother, and they walked for over nine months to reach Dibrugarh in Assam. Helen was born to a half-Spanish and half-Burmese mother named Marlene and a French father. Soon after her father’s death, her mother remarried a British officer and they were stationed in Burma when Japanese troops invaded the country.
In a chat with Filmfare in 1964, as quoted by Jerry Pinto in his book, Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, Helen recalled that her family left Burma in the December 1941 as “Burma was being mercilessly bombed by the Japanese.” She recalled, “My mother packed a few things and we went to the airport with my baby brother in mother’s arms. That night, the aerodrome was bombed. Frightened and nervous, we returned home.”
Helen recalled that she and her family were reduced to skeletons as they walked for nine months. (Photo: Express Archives)
Helen recalled how life became “unbearable” for them in Burma. Her step-father, whom she addressed as her father, was a British officer and had already been killed. And in this war torn state, they could not look to anyone for security. “When friends decided to come over to India with their families, mother agreed to join them,” she said. Helen said she often heard tales of this “torturous” journey from her mother Marlene.
Helen and her family walked for nine months with a group of Burmese people but only half of them ultimately reached Dibrugarh as many fell ill and died of starvation or were simply left behind because of the dangerous trek that went through hundreds of villages. Helen said, “Mother and I had been virtually reduced to skeletons and my brother’s condition was critical. We spent two months in the hospital.”
In a television special with Nasreen Munni Kabir, Helen recalled a vivid memory from her childhood when she passed a place that had recently been bombed. “I can still remember a moment when in the middle of the night, we were running out of the house and we passed a place where a bomb must have fallen. It was a shop and there was hair and blood and [bits of] skull on the wall,” she said.
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In a chat with her stepson Arbaaz Khan in 2023 on Bollywood Bubble, Helen shared that along with her and her brother, who died from smallpox after they reached Calcutta (now Kolkata) from Assam, her mother was actually pregnant with another baby. But due to the harsh trek, she suffered a miscarriage. “About 300-350 people migrated. In my family, there was my mother, my little brother, myself. We were both little, and my mother was pregnant, too. And she lost my little sister there,” she told him.
After staying in Calcutta for some time, Helen and her mother Marlene moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) and it was here that Helen started working from a very young age in the movies. She eventually found fame and became one of the most popular dancing icons of that era.
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