🇮🇳 Hrithik Roshan

He was born in Mumbai in January 1974, the son of producer-director Rakesh Roshan and Pinky Roshan, daughter of the legendary J. Om Prakash. He stammered until adolescence, was teased for the extra thumb on his right hand, and grew up in the Khar bungalow watching dailies of his father's productions. He worked as an assistant on Khudgarz (1987) at thirteen and on Karan Arjun (1995), Koyla (1997) and Karobaar (2000) as an associate director through his twenties. He learned the camera before he stepped in front of it.

Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai, directed by his father, made him an overnight national obsession. He won the Filmfare Best Actor and Best Male Debut in the same ceremony — the first and only actor to do so. The follow-ups were uneven (Fiza, Mission Kashmir, Yaadein) before Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) confirmed him as the natural heir-apparent in Hindi cinema's first family of celebrity.

Then the body changed. He went into the gym for Koi... Mil Gaya (2003), the Krrish prototype in which he played a developmentally-challenged young man whose alien friendship returns him to ability. He emerged with the physique that would become Bollywood's new template. Krrish (2006), Dhoom 2 (2006) and Krrish 3 (2013) built the country's first superhero franchise. His dance numbers — choreographed by his cousin Farah Khan and later Ahmed Khan — were the only ones Hindi cinema's tougher critics still wrote about as choreography.

His range expanded slowly and then completely. Jodhaa Akbar (2008) for Ashutosh Gowariker; Guzaarish (2010) for Sanjay Leela Bhansali, in which he played a quadriplegic magician seeking euthanasia, a role he prepared for by living in a wheelchair for weeks; Agneepath (2012); Kaabil (2017), in which he played a blind dubbing artist hunting his wife's killers. Six Filmfare Best Actor wins to date, second only to Dilip Kumar and Shah Rukh Khan.

He has a degenerative back condition that produces frequent disc issues, and underwent brain surgery in 2013 for a subdural hematoma. He continues to perform his own dance and most of his own stunts. The recovery routines — early-morning physiotherapy, restricted-calorie keto cycles, structured stretching — are by his account non-negotiable.

War (2019), Siddharth Anand's spy thriller alongside Tiger Shroff, became the third instalment of YRF's Spy Universe; Vikram Vedha (2022), a faithful remake of the Tamil neo-noir alongside Saif Ali Khan, was the only Hindi prestige drama of its season; Fighter (2024), with Deepika Padukone, became one of the year's biggest releases. The arc — superhero, classical lead, action — has been deliberate and intermittently slow. He has averaged roughly one film a year for two decades.

He occupies an unusual place in Bollywood demographics: he is the rare actor whom both children and grandparents identify by first name. The Krrish franchise placed him on lunchboxes; the Bhansali-and-Gowariker dramas placed him in serious cinematic memory; the dance numbers placed him in college reels for fifteen consecutive years. Younger choreographers — Bosco-Caesar, Vaibhavi Merchant, Ahmed Khan — speak of him with the deference usually reserved for classical dancers. The Krishna number 'Jai Jai Shivshankar' from War is, by Indian YouTube measurement, among the most-replayed dance sequences in Hindi cinema history.

He has, in interviews, traced a working philosophy back to his stammer. The childhood years of measured words taught him, he has said, to land on every syllable on screen. His delivery is unusually clean for a Hindi-cinema lead; his pauses, more so. Directors as different as Karan Johar, Ashutosh Gowariker, Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Sriram Raghavan have used the same word about working with him: prepared. He arrives, they say, with the lines learned, the body trained, and the questions written down in a notebook he carries between films.

Outside cinema he is a startup-stage operator with a portfolio that suits a banker more than a leading man. He has invested in Cure.fit, a fitness-tech platform now embedded into his HRX line; in HomeCapital, an Indian home-loan downpayment platform; and in nutrition company Eat.fit. He sits, quietly, on the board of his father's production company Filmkraft, which has produced every Rakesh Roshan film since 1980. He has, in interviews, dismissed the idea of acting as his only profession. He calls it his most public one.

His personal life has been the subject of more tabloid coverage than his films. The end of his marriage to Sussanne Khan in 2014 — preceded by a public health scare, the death of his close friend Jiah Khan, and a series of stress-related back injuries — was treated by the Bombay press as a national-event soap opera. He emerged from it, by his own account, with a meditation practice, a diet system he has not abandoned, and an architect's drawing of the apartment he eventually built on Juhu's seafront. He has spoken since about the recovery in plain terms: he is, he says, the rare leading man whose worst year was not on screen but off.

He was married to Sussanne Khan, daughter of architect Sanjay Khan, from 2000 to 2014; they have two sons, Hrehaan and Hridhaan. He has been in a relationship with the actress Saba Azad since 2022. He has refused, almost uniquely among A-list contemporaries, to anchor a reality show. Outside cinema he runs the activewear label HRX, founded in 2013, which by 2024 had been valued at over ₹2,500 crore — among India's largest celebrity-founded D2C brands.