🇮🇳 Ranveer Singh

He was born in Bombay in July 1985 to Sindhi parents — businessman Jagjit Singh Bhavnani and Anju Bhavnani. His grandfather Sundar Singh Bhavnani had migrated from Karachi during Partition; the family had no entertainment-industry connection beyond a great-grandmother said to have known the actress Sonam (Bakhtawar Kapur). He was a chubby, theatre-obsessed boy at H. R. College, performed in college plays, then enrolled at Indiana University Bloomington in 2007 for a creative-writing and theatre programme.

He returned to Mumbai in 2010, worked as a copywriter at O&M and JWT, and pushed his portfolio at Yash Raj Films casting director Shanoo Sharma for two years. Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), Maneesh Sharma's wedding-planner comedy opposite Anushka Sharma, was a small surprise hit and won him Filmfare Best Debut. Ladies vs Ricky Bahl (2011) and Lootera (2013) showed his range; then Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013) introduced him to Sanjay Leela Bhansali.

The Bhansali partnership has become one of Hindi cinema's defining collaborations. Three films, three peaks. Ram-Leela (a Romeo-and-Juliet transplant to Gujarat); Bajirao Mastani (2015, in which he played the Peshwa Bajirao Ballal and shaved his hairline back four inches); Padmaavat (2018, in which he played Alauddin Khilji, growing a beard, eating raw meat on camera and disappearing into a register critics described as feral). He won the Filmfare Best Actor for Bajirao and the Best Supporting Actor for Padmaavat.

Outside Bhansali he has carried a deliberately varied slate. Dil Dhadakne Do (2015) for Zoya Akhtar; Befikre (2016); Gully Boy (2019), Zoya Akhtar's underground-rap drama in which he played Murad, a Dharavi-born MC, won him a fourth Filmfare Best Actor and India's Oscar submission; 83 (2021), Kabir Khan's recreation of the 1983 World Cup, in which he played Kapil Dev; Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023) for Karan Johar; and Cirkus (2022), Jayeshbhai Jordaar (2022) — the rare under-performers.

He married Deepika Padukone in November 2018 in two ceremonies at Lake Como, Italy. Their daughter Dua was born in September 2024. The marriage is unusually public: matching outfits, joint magazine covers, public-display romance treated by India's tabloid press as ongoing front-page event.

His public style — pink fur coats, Gucci flares, head-to-toe Sabyasachi at airport — has split critics and dominated fashion press. His brand portfolio (he endorses over forty brands at one count) places him among Asia's highest-earning male celebrities. He has launched his own production company, Maker's Studios.

He has spoken openly about the toll of immersive preparation — months of seclusion to play Khilji, weight gain and loss for Bajirao, dental work for Gully Boy. He briefly underwent counselling after Padmaavat to climb out of the role. The Bhansali fourth film, Baiju Bawra, has been announced and postponed; his next major release, Don 3, is in production.

He is the rare contemporary Indian star whose persona is louder than his films. Where Aamir disappears into roles and Ranbir into restraint, Ranveer arrives entire — pre-amplified, pre-quoted, often pre-meme. Late-night talk shows treat him as a kind of variety act; serious cinema critics treat him as Bhansali's most disciplined modern muse. The two categorisations have rarely intersected before in Hindi cinema; he has held them simultaneously for over a decade.

His upcoming slate — Don 3 for Farhan Akhtar, the Bhansali project Baiju Bawra, an Aditya Chopra-produced action set in the Spy Universe — suggests an actor consciously moving from intensity into franchise. His detractors call the move overdue; his admirers, characteristically, call it audacious. Both groups agree on one thing: he has, in fifteen years, never once been mistaken for ordinary.

He embodies, more visibly than any contemporary, the post-2010 economic shift of Hindi cinema toward a star-as-brand-as-business model. His endorsement roster includes Adidas, Bvlgari, Maybelline, Thums Up and Manyavar, several of which were the first global luxury houses to sign an Indian male lead. He spends the off-season touring — the Da-Bangg, Slam and Dream tours — and writes most of his stage banter himself. He carries, in his work and his personal style, a peculiar contradiction: a small-town Sindhi boy's appetite for spectacle paired with a theatre-school discipline about delivery. It is, on balance, the most coherent contradiction in current Hindi cinema.

His relationship with Bhansali is reportedly the closest contemporary parallel to a long-form European director-actor partnership. Three films, three sustained periods of seclusion, three transformations. He has, in conversation, described Bhansali as the only director he has refused to argue with on set; in turn, Bhansali has cast him in every original film since Ram-Leela. Their fourth, the rumoured Baiju Bawra, has been postponed twice and recast once. Both men, by the accounts of those who have worked with them, are waiting for the same moment of readiness: a script, a budget and a window of months in which the actor has nothing else to disappear into.