MUMBAI: On Thursday, actor Kavita Chaudhary, who was most known for her roles as Lalitaji in Surf ads and as Udaan on television, passed suddenly. According to Ajay Sayal, Kavita Chaudhary’s nephew, the actress passed unexpectedly on Thursday night in Amritsar following a heart arrest. He stated, “On Thursday at 8:30 p.m., she passed away from cardiac arrest. While receiving treatment at Amritsar’s Parvati Devi Hospital, she passed away.” Kavita was sixty-seven years old. The actor Anang Desai stated, “I learned this morning that Kavita has passed away. She passed away last night. It is really depressing.She was a National School of Drama classmate of ours. Over the course of our three-year training, we studied together at NSD. We were in the same batch as Kavita, myself, Satish Kaushik, Anupam (Kher), and Govind Namdev. “She met me after she was diagnosed with cancer a few years prior, but we never discussed it because she wanted it to remain a private matter. She passed away in Amritsar, where she was originally from. She wasn’t doing well when I last spoke to her, some fifteen days earlier, while she was in Mumbai. I was notified this morning about Kavita’s passing by her nephew.” In the 1989 television series Udaan, Kavita portrayed IPS officer Kalyani Singh.In addition, she created the script and oversaw the performance, which was based on the life of her sister Kanchan Chaudhary Bhattacharya, who succeeded Kiran Bedi as the second IPS officer. Since there wasn’t much representation of female IPS officers in television shows or films at the time, Kavita was praised as an emblem of female emancipation. Kavita produced television programmes like IPS Diaries and Your Honour later in her career. In the 1980s and 1990s, Kavita gained notoriety for her role as Lalitaji in the well-known Surf advertisements. She portrayed the astute homemaker who always makes the correct decision and is frugal with her finances in this role. Speaking about her persona in the advertisements, she stated, “Lalita ji was this straightforward character that wasn’t really me, but he thought I could pick up on the tone.” He counted on the actor’s comprehension.” During the pandemic, Doordarshan rebroadcast Udaan. “For some it was just a serial, for me it was a call to free myself from situations I deemed impossible to overcome,” Smriti Irani remarked at the time.
