Actor Dia Mirza has revealed how she wanted to have some of her late father’s belongings in her house and how she came to be satisfied with what she actually had. In a new interview, Dia has spoken about her biological father, German artist Frank Handrich, who died when she was nine years old.

Dia’s mother Deepa is a Bengali interior designer. She and Frank separated when Dia was five years old. Frank later started another family. Deepa, too, got married to Ahmed Mirza from Hyderabad, whose surname Dia took on later.

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In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Dia spoke about how she wished she had some of her father’s possessions but all of them went to her step-brother. “All his belongings went to my step-brother who was born after he left. Some years ago, my step-brother came to Bombay to visit my mum and me, and I was showing him around the house. He walked into the corridor where I have lots of photographs, and there is one of me as a baby with my parents. In that moment, all the years of pain and baggage I was carrying, about wanting my father’s things, disappeared… I realised what I had was even more precious, which is my memories of him.”

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In 2018, Dia visited Germany to meet her father’s side of the family. She shared pictures with them and spent her days tracing her roots. In an interview with Miss Malini, Dia had spoken about her father. “I was very much attached to my father at the age of 4, he was my hero. In Lage Raho Munna Bhai, the shot where I am talking about how my father has lied to me in the cab with Jimmy (Shergil), on how disappointed I am with that lie, I say he is my Hero. That line came because I always perceived my father as a hero,” Dia said in the interview.

Dia is now a mother herself. She welcomed her son Avyaan in May this year. She also got married to Vaibhav Rekhi a few months before that.