Her stepdaughter was played by the Pakistani actress Sajal Ali, whose mother died during filming. On Sunday, Ms. Ali posted four words on Instagram.
"Lost my mom again," she wrote.
In a tribute on Instagram, Shekhar Kapur, the director of "Mr. India," called Sridevi "the most exciting actress I ever worked with."
"Your energy on camera was scintillating," Mr. Kapur wrote. "There was not a moment on screen that you did not have the audience in your grip. Be it an emotion, a comic moment, a dance."
The Indian news website The Quint reported that when Sridevi performed "Hawa Hawai," the signature song of "Mr. India," Mr. Kapur "didn't know whether to take close-ups of her face to capture those incredible expressions or long shots to capture her dance moves."
Hrithik Roshan, a co-star in "Bhagwaan Dada" (1986), recalled his hands shaking during his first-ever film shoot. For his sake, he wrote, Sridevi pretended to be nervous, too.
Shree Amma Yanger Ayyappan was born in Tamil Nadu in 1963.
In 1971, seven years before her debut in a lead Bollywood role, she won a Kerala state award for best child artist for her performance in "Poompatta," a Malayalam-language film. In 1976, she starred in the Tamil film "Moondru Mudichu" as a widower's new wife. She was just 13.
Her first marriage, to the actor Mithun Chakraborty, ended in divorce. She is survived by her second husband, Mr. Kapoor, and two daughters, Jhanvi and Khushi.
The film critic Rajeev Masand wrote on Twitter that he had "never known anyone who was so painfully shy, so quiet off screen, who just transformed into a force of nature when the cameras came on."
"She was an interviewer's nightmare," he wrote, "but the movie-buff's dream."
