🇮🇳 Alia Bhatt

She was born in March 1993 to the filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt and the former actress Soni Razdan. Her elder sister Shaheen is a writer who has openly discussed her depression in a memoir titled I've Never Been (Un)Happier; her half-sister Pooja, also an actress, is a generation older and has run her own production house since the 1990s. Dinner-table conversation, by all accounts, was about scripts — Mahesh Bhatt would screen his own films at home and demand notes from the children.

Karan Johar cast her at eighteen in Student of the Year (2012), an exercise in glossy nepotism that she survived by being self-aware about it on talk shows — the celebrated Koffee with Karan episode in which she misidentified the President of India became, briefly, an internet event and then, on her own initiative, a self-mocking ad campaign. The film made her famous; her next, Imtiaz Ali's Highway (2014), made her an actress. Playing a kidnapped bride who falls into a strange peace with her captor, she stripped off the gloss and won her first Filmfare nomination.

Udta Punjab (2016), in which she played a Bihari migrant labourer hooked on heroin, was a transformation; her accent, her flat-bare-foot walk, the dirt under the fingernails. Raazi (2018), as a Kashmiri spy married into a Pakistani military family on the eve of the 1971 war, was a confirmation. Each of these is a film a star turns down. She turned them on instead, and won her first Filmfare for Best Actress for the latter.

She co-founded the production company Eternal Sunshine Productions in 2021 — its first film was the 2022 thriller Darlings, opposite Shefali Shah, which she also led. The same year she launched Ed-a-Mamma, a sustainable children's clothing brand later acquired by Reliance Retail.

Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) — a Bhansali biopic of a 1960s Kamathipura brothel-keeper based on Hussain Zaidi's Mafia Queens of Mumbai — was the role for which she had been training without knowing it. The performance is built around stillness, the way only Bhansali's heroines are; the dance numbers around fury. The film won her the National Film Award for Best Actress, shared with Kriti Sanon for Mimi.

Six weeks after marrying Ranbir Kapoor at his Mumbai apartment in April 2022 — a Vastu-designed home named, in the family tradition, after the maternal grandfather — she announced her pregnancy from Cannes, where she was promoting Gangubai. Their daughter Raha was born on 6 November 2022.

Heart of Stone (2023), opposite Gal Gadot for Netflix, was her English-language debut. Reviews were mixed; the calculus — that an Indian actress could simply walk in and play a global tech expert with no narrative hand-wringing about her Indianness — was the point. The film was Netflix's third-largest film opening of the year.

Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), Karan Johar's first directorial in seven years, was the year's most-talked-about Hindi film and her biggest commercial reach as a Punjabi matriarch's granddaughter in love across a class divide. Jigra (2024), which she produced and led, was her first major test as a creative principal; the film underperformed and she defended it publicly without spin.

She is, at thirty-one, the youngest woman in Hindi cinema to have won the National Film Award for Best Actress while simultaneously running her own production company, her own clothing brand, a Time 100 entry in 2022 and 2024, a Met Gala debut in 2024 in a custom Prabal Gurung sari-train, and an A-list partner. The economy of her career has very little waste in it.