1. Rekha (birth name: Rekha Ganesan) was born in a Chennai household to Tamil actor Gemini Ganesan and Telugu actor Pushpavalli.
2. Rekha has one sister, five half sisters and a half brother; all from the same father, Gemini Ganesan. Even though Rekha and her cousins have different mothers, the actor is closely attached to them.
3. Rekha started off as a child actor in the 1966 Telugu film Rangula Ratnam. She made her film debut as a heroine in the 1969 Kannada film Operation Jackpot Nalli C.I.D 999. That same year, she made her Hindi film debut with Anjana Safar.
4. The Umrao Jaan actor did not reveal her parentage for a long, long time. In the early '70s, when she was beginning her career in Bollywood, she revealed the truth about her origins.
5. On the sets of Anjana Safar, a clueless 15-year-old Rekha was forced into a five-minute long smooching scene by star Biswajeet Chatterjee and the director Raja Nawathe.
6. Rekha was a fish out of water in the first ten years that she spent in Bombay. Coming from down south, she did not know Hindi and thus struggled to communicate with her cast and crew.
7. Rekha was not considered as a top heroine for quite some time. Her dark looks, plump figure and the loud clothing she wore in her films made her contemporaries scornful about her.
8. On returning with rumoured husband actor Vinod Mehra to his house, after getting 'married' in Calcutta, Mehra's mother was angry with Vinod for having married Rekha.
9. Rekha attended Rishi Kapoor and Neetu Singh's wedding on January 22, 1980, wearing sindoor and a mangalsutra! The marriage took place at RK Studios and was attended by the who's who of the film industry including Amitabh Bachchan along with his wife Jaya and parents.
10. Within a month of knowing businessman Mukesh Agarwal, Rekha married him and settled down. However, Rekha did not known at the time of courtship or marriage that Agarwal suffered from chronic depression, which apparently, ran in his family.