Sowmya Satyanarayana, better known as Soundarya, was from Kolar in Karnataka. Her father, K. S. Satyanarayana, was a film director. She was studying MBBS when she entered films, and acting soon became her career.
She became a very popular actress in Telugu and Kannada cinema and also worked in Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi. She could do a family drama in one film and then take up a completely different role in the next. That was one thing I liked about her.
In Ammoru, she played a woman who is badly treated by her in-laws. Ramya Krishnan was brilliant as the goddess, but Soundarya's character is the one you keep feeling sorry for. She made that suffering look very real.
Anthapuram was completely different. She played a mother caught in the middle of violence in Rayalaseema and spent much of the film trying to protect her child. There was a lot of fear in that character, but she never overdid it.
She acted with so many big stars too — Chiranjeevi, Venkatesh, Rajinikanth, Nagarjuna and Amitabh Bachchan. In Sooryavansham, Amitabh Bachchan played both father and son, and Soundarya played his wife.
She also produced Dweepa, a Kannada film directed by Girish Kasaravalli. She played Nagi in the film as well. It was not the kind of commercial role people normally associated with her, and the film went on to win the National Award for Best Feature Film.
I was a kid when she died in 2004, but I remember how shocking it was. She died in an aircraft crash with her brother Amarnath.
Her last released film was Apthamitra. She played Ganga/Nagavalli, and the film came out after her death. Watching her in that film now has a strange feeling to it. You know she was no longer there, yet there she is on the screen.
Soundarya's career was very short, but she managed to do a lot in those few years. Actress, producer, commercial films, serious films — she had already started doing different things when her life ended so suddenly.