Husband Vicky Goswami is a convicted criminal.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: Bollywood, which has been rocked recently by arrests of some well-known actresses, including Shweta Basu Prasad, for prostitution, is now faced with more bad news: Mamta Kulkarni, a popular heroine of the nineties who relocated to Kenya, was detained and her husband, Vicky Goswami, arrested there, on charges of drug trafficking.
A senior official from the Narcotics Control Bureau in Mumbai confirmed Kulkarni was detained and her husband arrested to The Hindu, but noted that there has been no official communication received by the agency yet.
“The actress has been detained and is being questioned by the authorities to ascertain her role,” the source said.
Goswami is a convicted criminal, who has a record of drug trafficking. In 1997, he was arrested by the Dubai police for trafficking of banned substances. Subsequently, a Dubai court sentenced him to 25 years of imprisonment but he was released last year.
Kulkarni made her debut in the Tamil film Nanbargal, and her Bollywood debut with the 1992 movie Tirangaa. She has also acted in a few Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Malayalam films.
Her big break came in 1993 with Aashiq Awara; she won a Filmfare Lux New Face Award for her role in that film. She then had a string of commercial hits in films like Waqt Hamara Hai (1993), Krantiveer (1994), Karan Arjun (1995), Sabse Bada Khiladi (1995) and Baazi (1995).
She is one of the few actresses to work with both Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan, in a leading role. She also is famous for posing ‘topless’ for the magazine Stardust in 1993. Her career went kaput, however, when she got into a controversy with the director Rajkumar Santoshi, after the film China Gate (1998) flopped. She felt berated by the way her role was ‘tampered’ in the film and accused Santoshi of making advances at her, which she said she had spurned.
At that time, there were rumors that Kulkarni was also associated with the notorious don Chhota Rajan. She eventually quit films in 2002, with the film Kabhie Tum Kabhie Hum being her last appearance in Bollywood.