Crash Diets and Blackouts: The Tragic Truth Behind Sridevi’s Final Hours
When Bollywood legend Sridevi died suddenly in 2018, the world was stunned. Just hours earlier, the 54-year-old superstar had been dancing and laughing at a family wedding in Dubai. By the end of the night, she was gone. Because her death happened abroad, far from the Indian media, the lack of immediate answers sparked a wave of wild rumours. People whispered about murder, pointed fingers at her husband, Boney Kapoor, and struggled to accept that a woman so full of life could simply drown in a hotel bathtub.
For five years, her family stayed quiet. But when Boney Kapoor finally spoke out, the story he told wasn't a crime thriller—it was a tragic, ordinary accident.
According to Boney, Sridevi was under immense pressure to stay slim for the screen. For years, she adhered to extreme, salt-free diets, often eating barely anything at all. It kept her looking incredible on camera, but it came at a terrible cost to her health. Ever since they were married, she had suffered from low blood pressure and occasional blackouts, though neither of them realised just how dangerous it was.
The pattern went back further than Boney even knew. After Sridevi died, the actor Nagarjuna told him about a night years earlier when she had fainted in the loo while filming on set during a crash diet, knocking out a tooth in the fall. The signs had been there for decades, but no one had tied them together.
On that fateful evening in Dubai, Sridevi fainted while in the bath and drowned.
What followed for Boney was a nightmare. Driven by intense pressure from the Indian press, Dubai Police put him through up to 48 hours of grueling interrogation, along with a full lie-detector test. They eventually cleared him completely, ruling her death a tragic, accidental drowning.
Boney chose not to speak publicly for years, wanting to grieve away from the intense media circus. When he finally set the record straight, he exposed the sad reality behind the headlines: a star who pushed her body past its limits to meet the harsh demands of fame, passed out at the wrong moment, and never woke up.