Kaviyoor Ponnama, synonymous with evergreen motherhood in Malayalam cinema, vexed several disturbing factors in movies in recent years. One of them is the waning of grandparent characters in new-generation films. “These days, children don’t need their parents as everyone has become self-centred.
This trend has affected movies too,” she said. Ponnamma has good reasons to feel that way, having appeared as mother and grandmother in hundreds of films. In ‘Atom Bomb’ (1969) she even enacted the role of Dolly Lakshmi, a mother of 12 children.
However, it was a comedy character. At the same time, the role that defined her career was the ideal mother in ‘Kudumbini’, released in 1964. Her character Mahalakshmi, which Ponnamma enacted when she was a mere 19, was based on the hypocrisies surrounding a typical family in Kerala those days.
In the movie, Ponnamma plays a newlywed bride who tolerates the taunts of her mother-in-law and the onslaught of her sister-in-law. She is a devout wife, who finally sacrifices her life by donating blood to the wife of her husband’s brother. This role earned Ponnamma so much popularity among family audiences in Kerala that she was in demand to play similar characters all her life.
When K S Sethumadhavan adapted ‘Odayil Ninnu’, a novel by P Kesavadev, into film in 1965, Ponnamma played the major character Kalyani. She also enacted the main role in P N Menon’s ‘Rosy’, where her character dies after delivery. The same year, she wa.