🇮🇳 Anushka Sharma

She was born in May 1988 in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, to Colonel Ajay Kumar Sharma of the Indian Army's Madras Engineer Group and his wife Ashima. The family moved with the postings — Bangalore, Bareilly, again Bangalore — and she finished school at Army School Bangalore and Mount Carmel College. Her brother Karnesh, a former Merchant Navy officer turned producer, would later run the company that distinguishes her from most of her peers.

She modelled in Bangalore for the late designer Wendell Rodricks before moving to Mumbai at eighteen. Aditya Chopra spotted her at a Yash Raj audition and cast her in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008) opposite Shah Rukh Khan; two years later, Maneesh Sharma's Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), opposite a then-unknown Ranveer Singh, gave her a film that was hers — a Delhi wedding-planner romance in which the heroine was the senior partner in the business and the relationship.

Jab Tak Hai Jaan (2012) and PK (2014), opposite Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan respectively, were the consolidation. By 2014 she had cleared the working-actress bar by every commercial measure available, and was the second-highest-paid actress in Hindi cinema after Kareena Kapoor.

She and Karnesh founded Clean Slate Filmz in 2013 — initially just to make NH10 (2015), a road-thriller that no major studio wanted to back about a Gurgaon couple who blunder into a Haryana honour killing while taking a wrong turn off the National Highway. The film recouped four times its Rs 100-million budget and won her her first Filmfare nomination as producer.

Clean Slate went on to produce Phillauri (2017), Pari (2018), the Netflix series Bulbbul (2020) — a colonial-era ghost story directed by Anvita Dutt — Mai (2022) starring Sakshi Tanwar, and Qala (2022), the directorial debut of Anvita Dutt centred on a 1940s Calcutta singer. Almost all of them are female-led, almost all of them genre experiments that the studio system would have softened.

She married the Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli in Tuscany at Borgo Finocchieto in December 2017. Their daughter Vamika was born on 11 January 2021; their son Akaay in February 2024. The couple has been the most-photographed cricket-cinema household in India since Sharmila Tagore and the Nawab of Pataudi in the 1970s.

Sui Dhaaga (2018), as a Bundelkhand seamstress opposite Varun Dhawan, and Zero (2018), as a NASA scientist with cerebral palsy opposite Shah Rukh Khan, were her last lead roles before motherhood. Chakda 'Xpress, a biopic of the cricketer Jhulan Goswami for Netflix, has been her long-delayed return — shot in stages between her two pregnancies and finally finished in 2024.

She is among the most public defenders of judicial process and privacy in India — refusing paparazzi photographs of her children's faces, refusing to comment on cases sub judice, asking the press in writing to respect the family's boundaries — and pays a measurable career cost for it. The cost has not, evidently, mattered to her.

She lives in Mumbai with Kohli, the children, and a working production office. Her output is now half-actress, half-producer-curator; the second half is, increasingly, the half that critics watch.