Dr Shriram Nene has spent more than two decades as the husband of one of Hindi cinema’s most recognised actors. In a new conversation with CNBC-TV18, he returned to a detail that still sets their story apart: when he met Madhuri Dixit, he had not seen her films and knew little about her professional career.
“I had never seen her films before getting married,” he said, adding that “what I saw was someone who was amazing.” He described the match as “semi-arranged”: the two dated for three months before he proposed.
A courtship outside the star image
The timeline he offered is compact. After three months of dating, he proposed, and they married in the United States in 1999. Madhuri Dixit stepped back from acting as the couple began their life together. They later became parents to two sons, Arin and Ryan.
- They dated for three months before he proposed.
- They married in the United States in 1999.
- Madhuri stepped back from acting after the marriage.
- The couple have two sons, Arin and Ryan.
For Bollywood Chronicle readers, the detail matters because it captures a top star marrying outside the film industry’s immediate gaze. Nene’s early unfamiliarity with her body of work was not indifference, he suggests, but a way of seeing the person before the public figure.
Why her fame did not unsettle him
Nene said both partners were secure in what they had achieved before they met. “I think both of us were kind of secure in our own knowledge of what we have done,” he said. He admitted that being married to a famous actor can be “daunting sometimes and you have to adapt.”
His medical training helped, he added. At UCLA, he said, he treated Hollywood celebrities and learned that “the only thing they really wanted was anonymity.”
Grounded by upbringing, not celebrity
Nene credited a middle-class upbringing for keeping the family grounded. The principle he keeps returning to is simple: treat everyone with dignity, “from the top to the bottom.”
He also laughed off being known mainly as Madhuri Dixit’s husband. He said he is not “bothered in the least bit” when people want to interview him because of her, and that people who meet him “realise that I am the real deal too.”
He noted the recognition ran in the opposite direction when they lived in the United States. There, no one knew who Madhuri was, while he was the heart surgeon. In India, he said, “her stature here is on another level.”
“She is a generational talent,” he said, adding that when people meet her they realise she does not strike them as someone who has done all she has done.
The interview is a useful addition to the record of Hindi cinema’s private histories: a reminder that one of its biggest stars has spent her married life with a partner who met her as a person, and remains “extremely proud of her.”
Source: News18
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