From CARAVAN (1971) -- “Piya Tu Ab To Aaja”: More on Helen: Born in Burma just before the Japanese invasion, the half-Burmese, half-Anglo-Indian child escaped the country now known as Myanmar on her mother’s back in the 1940s, growing up in Bombay, where she would go on to become Hindi cinema’s single most ubiquitous character actor slash dancer. Being an immigrant of mixed ethnicity, Helen got the vampy bit-part roles few if any native actresses of her stature would touch, playing everything from Chinese and Japanese to American and British characters. In Caravan, she played a Spanish woman named Monica, who, drunk and panting, exhorts her equally panting, bullfighter boyfriend. In a moment of raw, hot-blooded, unslaked desire, she also dry-humps the underside of a children’s playground slide.

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