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3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jan 31, 2026 08:37 PM IST
Tabu says she never met her father, never used his name’s relationship with her father, which has been non-existent since her parents divorced when she was three. The actor, today considered among the strongest female actors of her generation, comes from a family on strong women. She, however, was a quiet child who found her voice eventually. In an old interview, she spoke about not being connected to her father, after her parents’ divorce. Tabu, who is now 54, had even opened up about being single in a separate 2017 interview.
During a conversation with Simi Garewal on Rendezvous with Simi Garewal, she had spoken about her childhood, “I had a great childhood, we lived in Hyderabad all our lives, I lived with my grandparents (mother’s parents), after my parents divorced. My mum was a teacher and so I ended up spending more time with her mother, and my grandmother would pray and read books, and I grew up with that. I was very timid, I did not have a voice, in fact even after becoming a heroine, an actor, I did not have a voice.” Tabu’s elder sister Farah was an actor in the 80s; she is also related to actor Shabana Azmi.
In the same interview, the actor also talked about not wishing to meet her father, as she is now busy with her own life, and why she never used his surname ‘Hashmi’. “I never really used it, I never thought it was important for me to use my father’s surname, it was always Tabassum Fatima, which was my middle name. In school, Fatima was my surname.”
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She continued, “I have no memories of him. My sister has met him on occasion, but I have never really felt like meeting him. I am not curious about him, I am happy the way I am, the way I have grown up. I am very settled in my own life.” Tabu’s parents got divorced when she was just 3 years old, and her father got marries to someone else, and has two daughters with his second wife.
Tabu has never been married, and she has often opened up about singlehood in various interviews. During a chat with Hindustan Times in 2017, she had said, “Honestly, it’s not that it has stopped bothering me; the fact remains that I’ve never been perturbed (by this) at all. I don’t see what the big deal is, being single or being not single. For me, it’s not a (yardstick for) assessing somebody. I mean, I don’t assess someone according to their marital status or whether they have children or not. And if people do it for me, I don’t know about it and don’t want to go there.”
Meanwhile, on the work front, Tabu has a few films in the lineup – including Puri Jagannadh’s pan-India film with Vijay Sethupathi and Priyadarshan’s horror-comedy Bhooth Bangla opposite Akshay Kumar, scheduled to release this year.
