The daughter of a lecturer, actress Urmila Matondkar began her celluloid career as a child artiste with the film _Kalyug (1980)_. Although an average film at the box-office, her next film, Masoom (1983), about a family coping with an illegitimate member, showed her acting talents blossom and she received critical acclaim from both her fans and the film fraternity. She subsequently appeared in a number of films including Dacait (1987), where she plays Sunny Deol's under-aged sister who gets brutally raped.
Years later, Urmila then made her debut as an adult actress in N. Chandra's Narasimha (1991) opposite Sunny Deol . She then did the fantasy Miracle (1992) with the then-débutant Shahrukh Khan and Shreemaan Aashique (1993), a comedy on male chauvinism opposite Anupam Kher and Rishi Kapoor and a crime movie Drohi (1992), But no matter what films she did, while her fellow actresses Manisha Koirala and Raveena Tandon reached the peak of their popularity with blockbuster after blockbuster, success seemed to elude her.