“I never wanted to divorce him, despite the affair,” says Seema Kapoor
Late veteran actor Om Puri’s first wife, Seema Kapoor, has opened up about her troubled marriage with the acclaimed actor, revealing deeply personal and painful moments from their past. In a recent interview with Siddharth Kannan, Seema Kapoor, who is also the sister of actor Annu Kapoor, disclosed that Om Puri had an extramarital affair while she was pregnant—a revelation that she says turned her life upside down.
Seema Kapoor said the actor cheated on her during the filming of City of Joy, where he met journalist Nandita Puri, who would later become his second wife. “Everything was going fine after our marriage, but that movie turned my life upside down,” Seema recalled. “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.”
Despite her friends’ reassurances, Seema said she later learned of the affair when Om Puri himself called her while she was in Delhi and confessed that he was seeing someone else. At the time, Seema Kapoor was pregnant and hoped to mend the relationship.
“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,” she said. “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.”
Eventually, the emotional strain became too much. Seema Kapoor said that Om Puri’s excessive drinking and the drama caused by his new relationship with Nandita Puri pushed her over the edge. “One night, I decided to leave. I was three months pregnant.”
Tragically, Seema later lost the child. She revealed that Om Puri sent her Rs 25,000 through his secretary, which she refused to accept. “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,” she said.
According to Seema, her brother Annu Kapoor even considered taking legal action against Om Puri at the time. She eventually received Rs 6 lakh as alimony.
In 1993, Om Puri married Nandita Puri and the couple had a son named Ishaan. The actor passed away in 2017. Seema Kapoor mentioned that before his death, Om Puri reached out to her and apologised for the past.
This candid interview has once again drawn attention to the lesser-known personal struggles behind the public lives of celebrated figures like Om Puri, whose legacy in Indian cinema remains monumental.
Sources By Agencies
