🇮🇳 Kamal Haasan

Kamal Haasan was born on 7 November 1954 in Paramakudi, a small town in the Ramanathapuram district of southern Tamil Nadu, the youngest of four children. His father, D. Srinivasan, was a criminal-defence lawyer and a Tamil-nationalist sympathiser of Periyar's Dravidian movement; his mother, Rajalakshmi, was a homemaker who is reported to have insisted, against the conventions of her caste, that her sons learn dance. The Haasan household read books. The Haasan household argued. Kamal, the youngest, watched.

He made his film debut at the age of five in Kalathur Kannamma (1960), a Tamil melodrama in which the child of separated parents finds his mother in a village schoolhouse. The performance won him a President's Gold Medal — and a place, immediately, in Madras cinema's small ecosystem of child actors. For most of the 1960s he worked steadily but unremarkably as a child performer; he did not return to lead roles until his teens, by which time he had spent seven years as an assistant choreographer to the dance master Thangappan, and several more as a still-photography apprentice. The polymath habits were already setting.

His adult breakthrough was Apoorva Raagangal (1975), the K. Balachander film that also produced Rajinikanth. Balachander cast Haasan as a young man in love with a much older woman — a role that, for the conservative Tamil cinema of the day, was scandalous. Haasan was twenty-one. He won his first Filmfare South. He would go on to win, over a fifty-year career, four National Film Awards for Best Actor — for Moondram Pirai (1982), Nayakan (1987), Indian (1996), and the unprecedented dual-language self-direction Vishwaroopam (2013) — placing him in the same statistical neighbourhood as the most decorated actors in any cinema in the world.

The films of his middle period read like a checklist of formal risk-taking: Nayakan (1987), a gangster epic; Apoorva Sagodharargal (1989), in which he plays both a circus dwarf and his brother; Michael Madana Kama Rajan (1990), in which he plays quadruplets; Avvai Shanmughi (1996), a Mrs. Doubtfire-style cross-dressing comedy that became one of Tamil cinema's biggest hits; Indian (1996), as an aged anti-corruption vigilante; Hey Ram (2000), his self-directed meditation on Gandhi's assassination; and Dasavathaaram (2008), in which he plays ten distinct characters of varying caste, gender, race, and age. Few actors in world cinema have agreed to that many prosthetics. Fewer have survived the audience.

Off screen he was, by the standards of Indian film actors, theatrically open: a self-declared rationalist in a deeply religious industry, twice married and twice divorced, the long-time partner of the actress Gautami, a public friend of writers Sujatha and Charu Nivedita, a voracious reader of philosophy and Marxist criticism. He gave interviews in English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, and on at least one televised occasion French. He kept a working library of close to ten thousand books on Eldams Road in Chennai. Critics who did not like his films called him pretentious. He shrugged.

In February 2018, on the streets of Madurai, he announced the founding of a political party, Makkal Needhi Maiam — "People's Justice Centre" — explicitly modelled, in its symbol and its rhetoric, on the political style of his late friend the director K. Balachander and on Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi. He has run, since, in two Tamil Nadu legislative elections and a Lok Sabha campaign, winning no seat outright but functioning as the most articulate centrist voice in a state polarised between Dravidian heirs. "Politics is not a hobby," he told NDTV in 2018. "It is a profession. I have started late."

Vikram (2022) reset, late, the commercial register. Directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj, the film was a slow-burn action thriller that wove together three generations of Tamil cinema's anti-hero franchises into a single cinematic universe. It grossed over four hundred crore worldwide. Indian 2 (2024), again with Shankar, returned him to his National Award role thirty years later. He turned seventy that November and continued, by every available indicator, to refuse the idea of retirement. The polymath habit had not relaxed. It had simply, in the man's eighth decade, acquired a party manifesto.