Biography

Patience Cooper was an Anglo-Indian actress, and one of the early superstars of Bollywood. She was the daughter of Phoebe Stella Gamble (born in Calcutta in 1881; daughter of John Frederick Gamble and Phoebe Stella Clement whose mother was Armenian and James Alfred Cooper. An Anglo-Indian born in Howrah, West Bengal, and baptised on 30 May 1902, Cooper had a successful career in both silent and sound films. She is credited with the first double roles of Indian cinema—as twin sisters in Patni Prataap and as mother and daughter in Kashmiri Sundari, even though earlier in 1917, actor Anna Salunke had played roles of both the male lead character Ram and the female lead character Seeta in the film Lanka Dahan.