Late actor Rajendra Kumar earned the moniker Jubilee Kumar for a reason. The 1955 movie Vachan gave him overnight fame and ran for 25 weeks straight at the box office, a feat that was called a silver jubilee in those days. While Rajendra Kumar was generally known to be a polite and soft-spoken person, an incident that occurred during the making of the 1963 film Dil Ek Mandir changed his equation with Nargis for quite several years.
According to reports, the director CV Sridhar had initially cast Nargis in the film along with Rajendra Kumar and was looking for another male actor as the second lead. Rajendra Kumar and Nargis both recommended different people for the role. Rajendra Kumar recommended Raaj Kumar for the role whereas Nargis recommended Sunil Dutt. Since Nargis shared a strong friendship with CV Sridhar, the director listened to her and roped in Sunil Dutt, which infuriated Rajendra Kumar. He reportedly said he would not start filming until and unless Raaj Kumar was signed.
Following this, Nargis chose to drop out of the movie and reports stated that she was shocked to see Rajendra’s stubbornness. This led to heated arguments with each other. After Nargis dropped out of the movie, Meena Kumari was cast for the movie. After Nargis’s exit, Sunil Dutt also did not want to do the movie and Rajendra Kumar had his way, with Raaj Kumar playing the other lead.
One would think that the two legends of Indian cinema would not be on good terms after this incident, but as fate would have it, two decades later, their children fell in love with each other and married. Rajendra Kumar’s son Kumar Gaurav married Nargis’s daughter Namrata Dutt in 1984. Rajendra Kumar also had a relationship of mutual respect with Sunil Dutt throughout their lives.