By the mid-1940s her career went downhill as the new leading ladies came in. Leela accepted the reality and in 1948 entered the next, and perhaps most renowned, phase of her career in "Shaheed" ("Martyr"). Cast as the hero's suffering, ailing mother, she played this role to perfection. For 22 years, Chitnis played the mother of the later leading men including Dilip Kumar, often playing an ailing mother or a mother going through hardships and struggling to bring up her offspring. In fact she created the archetype of the Hindi Film mother, which was continued by later actresses. Leela's maternal histrionics were portrayed in a range of films such as "Awaara" ("The Vagabond", 1951), "Ganga Jumna" ("The Confluence", 1961) and, in 1965, the runaway success "Guide", based on the award-winning novel of the same name by R.K. Narayan. She was busy through the 1970s, but cut down her appearances thereafter before taking the final curtain call in "Dil Tujhko Diya" ("I Give My Heart to You") in 1985. She then emigrated to the United States in the late 1980s to join her children. She died in Danbury, Connecticut at a nursing home, at age 94.