In an old interview to Grihalakshmi that's doing the rounds again, the actor talks about her 14-year break from films, her comeback through dance, and life with Dileep and their daughter.
An old interview Manju Warrier gave to Grihalakshmi is back in circulation, and it's got people talking about a line her daughter Meenakshi apparently dropped years ago: that mum's acting counts as overacting.
In the interview, translated and reported by Filmibeat Malayalam, Warrier talks about the 14 years she spent away from acting after her marriage, and how she never really struggled with the decision. "I didn't feel any pain over not being able to work even for a moment in those 14 years," she says in the piece. "I genuinely enjoyed my life as a woman at home during that time."
The stepping-away, she insists, was entirely her own call, not something forced on her. "That's how society thinks," she says of the assumption that her husband, actor Dileep, kept her from working. According to the interview, the two never even discussed whether she should act again. "He has never told me whether I should act or not. We haven't even spoken about it."
What pulled her back wasn't a film offer. It was a dance teacher named Geetha, brought in to train her daughter, who ended up training Warrier too. Sitting in on Meenakshi's, or Meenootty's, classes, Warrier says the itch to perform again crept up on her without warning. She says she first mentioned it to Dileep, who was apparently stunned by the sudden change of heart, before six months of practice turned into a full comeback performance in front of the deity at Guruvayur.
The part that's traveling furthest online, though, is what Meenakshi thinks of her mother's screen work. Warrier recalls her daughter saying she prefers Dileep's films, and that for her mother's performances, "overacting" is the word Meenakshi uses. Warrier admits she's not sure if the comment was said in jest, but confesses it stings a little every time she thinks about it. She adds that she can't sit through her own films for long, saying she starts feeling the performance wasn't good enough.
On Dileep himself, she pushes back against the idea that his career took off because of the marriage, crediting his hard work instead and noting that failures don't rattle him. She also describes a fairly hands-off arrangement between them, saying she signs documents where he tells her to and stays out of the business dealings run under her name.
Neither Warrier nor Dileep has commented on the interview's fresh round online. There's no word yet on when the original Grihalakshmi conversation was recorded, and it isn't clear what prompted it to resurface now.
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