For the first time, actor-director Amar Khan opened up on her relationship with her estranged father and the struggles of her mother as a single parent.
In a poignant tell-all with former supermodel and now entrepreneur Frieha Altaf, on her podcast ‘FWhy’, Amar Khan shared that her parents parted ways when she was only two and her mother, veteran actor Fareeha Jabeen raised her as a single parent then, with no support from her father.
Khan, who recalled growing up in a family home in Lahore, with her maternal side of the family, revealed, “My parents separated when I was two, I guess. So I didn’t get to spend much time with my Abba. He was in New York, he has a family there.”
“I’ve been raised by a single parent,” she added.
A filmmaker by education, the ‘Baddua’ actor shared that she always wanted to be an actor, but was reluctant to share her aspirations with her mother, due to all the hardships she went through for being an actor herself.
“When she started off in this profession, it was out of passion. But then she was a single parent, so even if she did not get the meatiest role, she would take it, as it was her bread and butter,” Khan explained.
Sharing a moving anecdote from her school days, when she was not allowed to sit in exams for not paying the semester fees, Khan acknowledged the privilege that she had, because her mother paved the way for her daughter’s career aspirations with her sacrifices, while her father had no contribution to it.
She shared, “When he found out I was going to enter the industry, he wrote to me in a long email – we had a formal relationship, I anyway didn’t know him much — that how me joining the showbiz like my mother would inadvertently bring shame to the family. To which, I wrote back, ‘I don’t think I’ll bring shame to Mom especially and of course not to you also.'”
“The way she raised me, she had always instilled in me to be cordial with him, to give him an enormous amount of respect, break that ice, but unfortunately, I could not. And then we never spoke. I was in BNU at the time, graduating, and after that, we haven’t spoken,” Khan added.
For the unversed, Khan is the only daughter of veteran TV actor Fareeha Jabeen.
On the work front, the filmmaking graduate was last seen in the drama serial ‘Baddua’.