Destination: Mumbai, India

Talk about resilient: in 1942 Lalita Pawar, an up-and-coming leading lady, was filming a scene with Bollywood newcomer Bhagwan Dada in which the actor was supposed to slap her. Unsure of how hard a movie slap should be, Dada overestimated and ended up hitting Pawar hard enough to burst a nerve near her left eye and cause facial paralysis. After three years of treatment, she still had a defective eye, but instead of quitting altogether, Pawar switched from lead roles to the character roles in which she would excel. Justly famous for her portrayals of wicked matriarchs and mother-in-laws, Pawar would continue to appear in films until 1990, when she was diagnosed with jaw cancer. She died in 1998.