🇮🇳 Akshay Kumar

His father Hari Om Bhatia was an army accountant; his mother Aruna ran the household between postings in Delhi, Punjab and Mumbai's Chandni Chowk neighbourhood — confusingly, the Mumbai one, in Koliwada. He trained in kathak under Master Kishan Maharaj at the suggestion of his mother and in karate at a Don Bosco gym. After a brief detour as a chef in Bangkok and a stint teaching martial arts in a Mumbai studio, a student's father — a photographer — paid him for modelling shots. He took the portfolio to Pramod Chakravarthy and got cast.

His debut, Saugandh (1991), passed unnoticed. Khiladi (1992), Abbas-Mustan's twist thriller, established the brand. Over the nineties he was the action lead studios called when they wanted bruises and a tight schedule: Mohra, Main Khiladi Tu Anari, Sabse Bada Khiladi, Khiladiyon Ka Khiladi. The Khiladi tag stuck, the marriage to actress Twinkle Khanna (in 2001) reset his image, and Hera Pheri (2000) revealed a comedian critics had failed to notice.

From 2007, with Bhagam Bhag, Welcome and Singh Is Kinng, he became Bollywood's most bankable comedy lead. From 2016 onward, the films pivoted again — to socially-themed, government-aligned, often patriotic vehicles. Airlift, Rustom, Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Padman, Kesari, Mission Mangal, Bell Bottom, Sooryavanshi. He won the National Award for Best Actor for Rustom (2016). He played the Indian-origin pad inventor Arunachalam Muruganantham, the IAF officer of the Kuwait airlift, a Karnal-born Mahavir Singh Phogat figure in cricket, an ISRO scientist.

He is, almost uniquely among Hindi leads, a businessman in plain sight. He owns or has owned production companies (Hari Om Productions, Cape of Good Films, Cape of Good Films LLP), a stake in the Pro Kabaddi League team Bengal Warriors, a chain of martial-arts schools, and endorsements ranging from Honda to Nirma. Forbes has repeatedly placed him among the world's top ten highest-paid actors — twice ahead of every other Indian.

He took Canadian citizenship in 2011, citing an honorary doctorate from the University of Windsor and a friend's casual nomination; he renounced it in 2023 after years of political pressure and applied for Indian citizenship again. He had, in the interim, fronted Mann Ki Baat-style content for the government, hosted prime-ministerial 'non-political' interviews, and shouldered the public-service-cinema slate of his Eid releases.

His marriage to Twinkle Khanna — daughter of Dimple Kapadia and the late Rajesh Khanna, herself an actress turned columnist — has been the most uxorious public relationship in the industry. They have two children; she runs a film production company that has financed Pad Man and Mission Mangal among others. He has said in interviews that he wakes at four-thirty, finishes his work by six in the evening and refuses night shoots. His producers have learned to schedule around it.

The criticism has caught up only intermittently. Films like Selfiee, Bachchhan Paandey and Samrat Prithviraj underperformed in 2022–23; the over-production model was visibly straining. He responded the way he always has: by accelerating. OMG 2, Sarfira and Khel Khel Mein opened across 2023–24 to mixed but recovering returns. He has six films lined up at the time of writing.

His public image has come, over the past decade, to merge inseparably with that of the Indian state. He has hosted the Prime Minister for tea and televised conversation, opened ministry-affiliated awareness campaigns on water conservation and women's hygiene, and given several of his films free auditorium screenings for armed-forces personnel. Critics have read the alignment as political; he has consistently called it patriotic. The distinction matters to him; he gives almost no political comment outside the structured frame of his film promotions.

He remains, contractually and rhetorically, the most accessible Hindi-cinema lead working today. He shoots Republic Day fitness videos at four in the morning, replies to fan messages on holidays, and writes long Instagram captions in three languages. His co-stars repeat one observation almost verbatim: he is the only A-list lead who arrives on set before the spot boys.

Akshay's working life has been, by any measure, the most relentless in the history of mainstream Hindi cinema. He has shot, on average, between three and five films a year for over two decades — a number unmatched in any contemporary star system, Hollywood included. The pace is sustainable, he has said, only because he refuses to take work home: when the wrap is called, the production stops in the parking lot. He has, in nearly thirty-five years of public visibility, never given an interview drunk, never been photographed at a nightclub, and never failed to deliver a film on schedule. The industry treats this as the actor's least-discussed achievement.

He is, by his own reckoning, a self-made arithmetic problem. Born without a Mumbai surname, trained as a chef and a martial artist, drilled into film discipline by the rejection of his earliest auditions, he now sits at the centre of one of the most expensive star portfolios in Asian entertainment. He has, since 2017, banked roughly forty consecutive nine-figure paychecks and is on most years the highest tax-paying individual in Hindi cinema. He turns down party invitations, refuses film-industry awards events, and continues to refer to himself, with no apparent irony, as a son of the army accountant from Amritsar who taught him to fold a uniform.