🇮🇳 Priyanka Chopra Jonas

She was born in Jamshedpur in July 1982 to two army doctors, Ashok and Madhu Chopra. The family moved often — Bareilly, Lucknow, Pune — and at thirteen she was sent to live with an aunt in Newton, Massachusetts, and later Cedar Rapids, Iowa. American high school, in Chopra's later telling, was where she learned both Hindi-film nostalgia and the precise mechanics of being underestimated by white classmates who could not place her on a map.

After Miss World — which she won partly on the strength of an unscripted answer about Mother Teresa, partly because she has never been good at hiding ambition — Hindi cinema arrived in a rush of forgettable assignments. The Hero (2003), Andaaz (2003), Aitraaz (2004). Then Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion (2008), in which she played a Chandigarh model unravelling on Mumbai's catwalks under the weight of substance abuse and a casting couch, won her the National Film Award for Best Actress at twenty-six. The film cost an estimated Rs 100 million and grossed three times that.

She spent the next five years assembling an unusually catholic filmography: the autistic protagonist of Barfi! (2012), the Punjabi boxer of Mary Kom (2014), the seven characters of What's Your Raashee?, the Maharashtrian princess of Bajirao Mastani (2015). Critics complained she was uneven. The complaint missed the strategy, which was less about consistency than about footprint — she wanted, visibly, every possible kind of part available to a Hindi actress before she would consider the part exhausted.

In parallel, she released an English-language single, In My City, in 2012, signed to Interscope, and recorded with will.i.am and Pitbull. The music was, on the whole, mediocre. The strategy of the music — the establishment of an American producer Rolodex, a New York apartment, a US visa pattern — was not.

In 2015 she became the first South Asian woman to headline an American network drama: Alex Parrish, the wrongly accused FBI recruit at the centre of ABC's Quantico. The show ran three seasons and 57 episodes. Chopra commuted between Mumbai film sets and Montreal soundstages, sleeping on planes and reading scripts in two languages on the same flight.

She married the American musician Nick Jonas in December 2018 in a three-day Christian-Hindu ceremony at Jodhpur's Umaid Bhawan Palace. Vogue ran the wedding on its cover, with photographs by Joe Buissink; her Ralph Lauren wedding gown carried a 75-foot veil. Their daughter Malti Marie was born via surrogate in January 2022 and spent her first hundred days in a NICU, a detail Chopra disclosed only after the family came home.

Citadel (2023), Amazon's $300-million spy series produced by the Russos opposite Richard Madden, made her one of the most expensive Indian actresses in streaming. The reviews were mixed; the renewal was instant. The brief, for Hollywood, had clearly stopped being whether she could carry a global action lead and had become which one to put her in next.

She has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2010, a venture investor through her firm Anomaly Ventures, and a beauty entrepreneur via Anomaly Haircare. She owns a Manhattan restaurant called Sona. She has produced regional-language Indian films through her company Purple Pebble Pictures, almost all of them in tongues she does not speak. Each of these reads, in interviews, less like diversification than like a single long sentence about leverage.

Her 2021 memoir Unfinished spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It is, characteristically, less about acting than about the engineering of a life — the negotiation of hostile rooms, the discipline of underestimation, the strange peace of being, finally, the most-Googled Indian woman alive.