Om Puri’s first wife, Seema Kapoor, has opened up about their troubled marriage in an interview with Siddharth Kannan. She shared how things went wrong when Om got involved with another woman while she was pregnant. The heartbreak pushed her to walk away, and sadly, she later lost the baby.
Seema recalled that Om met Nandita during the filming of City of Joy and said “Everything was going fine after our marriage, but that movie turned my life upside down… My good friend Renu Saluja, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s first wife, knew about the affair. But she and Sudhir Mishra and everyone else chalked it down to a phase. They felt that he’d get back to normal after the film. I found out about the affair much later, when I was in Delhi. He called me up and told me that he was seeing someone else, and my friends said that he was just seeking attention.”
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While everyone around them believed it was just a passing phase, Seema soon realised Om was serious about ending the marriage. She found love letters, “I returned to Mumbai, and everything felt normal. He left the city for a shoot soon afterwards, and while sifting through his stuff, I discovered love letters. I was shattered. I never wanted to divorce him, despite the affair. I wanted to mend things, because I was pregnant. He knew I was pregnant, but this was a source of insecurity for Nandita. She’d call him up in front of me,” she said.
Although she didn’t want a divorce, the emotional stress became too much to bear “But things became overwhelming; Puri sahab would drink too much, and Nandita would make a scene. One night, I decided to leave. I was three months pregnant.”
Her brother, actor Annu Kapoor, wanted to take legal action, and although she later received ₹6 lakh in alimony, she refused an additional ₹25,000 that Om sent through his secretary after their child’s death. She recalled “Forget consoling me. He sent Rs 25,000 via his secretary. I turned it down, and his secretary told me, ‘This ego is what is destroying you’. But what he thought was ego was just self-respect”.
Seema mentioned that years later, in his final days, Om reached out to apologize for his actions.
