NEW DELHI: Balaji Motion Pictures has reiterated that the film "The Dirty Picture" is the romantic journey of a fiercely ambitious starlet Silk Smitha who dreams of making it big on the silver screen and is not inspired by the story of any person, living or dead.

Reacting to the legal notice sent by the South star‘s brother V Naga Vara Prasad against the film‘s director Milan Luthria and producer Ekta Kapoor for making the biopic without any formal permission from the family, Balaji said the film "draws inspiration from the strugglers in the 80s whose indomitable spirit made them emerge triumphant and create a unique space for themselves in a male-dominated film industry."

‘The film is not a formal biopic or biography, as is being speculated. It is a work of fiction, and any characters resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.‘

"The Dirty Picture" is in essence, a love story, and a celebration of the never-say-die spirit of every industry newcomer.

The clarification comes in the wake of speculation that the Milan Luthria-directed film starring Vidya Balan is based on the life of the late actress Silk Smitha.

Silk Smitha had started as a make-up girl in 1970s and then become a movie extra and subsequently the most wanted heroine of the early 80s. The sobriquet "Silk" came in 1979, with her first Tamil film Vandi Chakkaram, in which she played a bar girl named Silk. In a career spanning 17 years, she did over 450 films in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi.

She was found dead in her apartment in Chennai in 1996, and her death remains a mystery till today.