🇮🇳 Kangana Ranaut

She was born in Bhambla, Himachal Pradesh, in March 1987 to Amardeep Ranaut, a businessman, and Asha, a teacher. The Rajput family had been settled in the valley for generations; her great-great-grandfather Sanat Singh had been a sitting MLA. She quit school at sixteen — she had wanted to study medicine, failed a chemistry exam by what she later called a single mark, and broke with her father over the disappointment — and reached Delhi via a Chandigarh modelling agency.

She trained for several months under the theatre director Arvind Gaur at Asmita Theatre Group, where she played a sex worker in the Hindi adaptation of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. The director Anurag Basu spotted her on the strength of a portfolio and offered her the lead in Gangster (2006) at nineteen.

Anurag Basu's Gangster (2006) was her Hindi debut. She played a self-destructive alcoholic mistress in Mumbai's underworld and won the Filmfare for Best Female Debut. Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion (2008) won her the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actress at twenty-one for a single fifteen-minute sequence as a meth-addicted model unravelling in public.

She spent the next several years in a string of dark, brittle parts that mainstream Hindi cinema struggled to place — Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), Tanu Weds Manu (2011) — until Vikas Bahl's Queen (2014), in which she played a Delhi girl named Rani who travels alone to Paris and Amsterdam after being dumped by her fiancé days before the wedding. Queen made her — for the first time — a heroine the multiplex audience adored. The National Film Award for Best Actress followed.

Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015), in which she played both Tanu Trivedi and a Haryanvi athlete named Datto in the same film, made her the rare actress to win the National Film Award for Best Actress twice in successive years.

Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi (2019), about the 1857 rebel queen Rani Lakshmibai, was her first directorial credit. The production was famously turbulent — the original director Krish Jagarlamudi left mid-shoot after disputes; Ranaut took over and re-shot large portions; allegations of on-set firings became a public soap opera in their own right — but the film was, finally, hers, and earned a National Film Award for Best Costume.

Thalaivii (2021), as the Tamil actress-politician J. Jayalalithaa, was the role for which she had been auditioning her whole life. She lost twenty kilograms, then put on twenty, learned Tamil for the dialogue tracks, and gave a performance the Tamil press received with the rare adjective definitive. The National Film Award for Best Actress — her fourth, across two categories — followed for Thalaivii alongside Panga.

She has been one of the most public voices on the Indian right since 2017, a vocal supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party, a Padma Shri awardee (2020), and a target of multiple defamation suits filed by industry colleagues including Hrithik Roshan, Karan Johar and the journalist Javed Akhtar.

In June 2024 she won the Mandi Lok Sabha seat for the BJP, defeating the Congress candidate Vikramaditya Singh by over 70,000 votes. Her debut as a director-actor of a political film, Emergency (2024), about Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's 1975 suspension of civil liberties, opened the same year after censor delays — the kind of inversion only her career produces.