Meet actress who became overnight sensation, accident put her in coma for 29 days, quit Bollywood to become monk, now...

The 1990 musical drama Aashiqui marked the debut of Rahul Roy and Anu Aggarwal. Directed by Mahesh Bhatt, the film became a blockbuster and its soundtrack became one of the best selling albums in Hindi cinema. Its songs such as Nazar Ke Saamne, Dheere Dheere Se, Bas Ek Sanam Chaahiye, and Jaane Jigar Jaaneman are still popular today.

Anu Aggarwal acted in a few other movies such as King Uncle with Shah Rukh Khan and Jackie Shroff, and Khal-Naaikaa with Jeetendra and Jaya Prada. As her movies flopped at the box office, she moved away from acting after her last movie Return of Jewel Thief released in 1996.

In 1999, Anu met with a serious accident, that left her in coma for 29 days and wiped her entire memory. In an interview with Indian Express in 2024, Anu recalled that she had no memory about her debut film even after her mother made her watch it. "I watched the film when I had my memory loss after the accident. My mother played it for me, but I couldn’t relate with it at all. I couldn’t relate with the girl on screen! My mother kept saying, ‘That’s you!’ I just like a child kept looking at it, but I couldn’t connect. At that time Aashiqui 2 was out, so she then played that for me. But nothing still made sense to me. She told me, 'See this was your film Aashiqui and now they have made Aashiqui 2.' I asked her, 'What is 2?' Because I didn’t know numbers, what was one, two, three. That was my state", she said.

In 2011, the former actress left for the mountains to live as a monk. Talking to HealthShots.com, she shared why she quit Bollywood as she said, "When people taste success, it is easy to get sucked into the spiral of stardom. But I opted out of it and more than ever, I needed to know myself better. I wanted to know 'me', which is beyond my role as an actor. I found relief in yoga and my effort today is to awaken as many people as possible to this idea of living a life."

Anu Aggarwal now lives in Mumbai, and practices yoga. She is quite active on Instagram too as she keeps sharing pictures and videos from her personal life on Instagram. The former actress wants to make her Bollywood comeback and is meeting filmmakers and producers for the same.