In pics: How Madhuri Dixit enjoyed a life of anonymity and independence in US

Having made a niche space for herself in Bollywood, Madhuri Dixit decided to marry and move out of India at the prime of her career. She moved to the US in 1999 and lived there for a over a decade. On her 55th birthday on Sunday, we take a look at Madhuri’s life in the United States.

Having made her debut in 1984 with Abodh, Madhuri soon featured in films such as Dayavan, Tezaab and Ram Lakhan. She was also widely appreciated for her work in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, Abhishek Chaubey’s Dedh Ishqiya and Rajkumar Santoshi’s Lajja.

Madhuri moved back to India in 2011 and her husband and two kids–Arin Nene and Ryan Nene also shifted to India with her in October 2011. Most recently seen in the Netflix film The Fame Game, Madhuri has also been working on a TV show. She is one of the judges on Dance Deewane.

But in the interim, the actor played a different role in the US–that of a wife and mother as she lived with her family in Denver. In interviews she gave and pictures she shared later, she showed how she lived a life of relative anonymity in the US, exploring the freedom she didn’t have in India.

Talking about her life in Denver, Madhuri had told Rediff in an interview, “Like any other person, I would wake up in the morning, wake the kids up, get them dressed for school, drop them off to school. Earlier, when the younger one was with me all the time, I used to drop the older one off to school and entertain the little one by taking him to libraries and other places. In the afternoon, I would take them to their different activities like swimming, soccer and taekwondo. Once dinner was done, it was time to go to sleep because they had to wake up early in the morning.”

In an old interview, Madhuri had shared the difference between living in the US and living in India. “In India, you are so dependent on your maid servants. You can leave everything on them, but in USA, you have to cook, clean up, buy groceries, everything on your own. I remember when the first time I went grocery shopping in US, my heart was thumping. But then, I felt so good. It’s a feeling of freedom here,” she had said at Talks at Google, as per an Indian Express report.

Madhuri will be seen next in Amazon Prime Video’s first Hindi original film Maja Maa. The film is directed by Anand Tiwari and also stars Gajraj Rao, Ritwik Bhowmik, Rajit Kapur, and Simone Singh are some other star cast in the film, which is being directed by .