🇮🇳 Saif Ali Khan

Saif Ali Khan was born on 16 August 1970 in New Delhi, the elder child of the cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi — the captain who in the 1960s rebuilt Indian Test cricket as a fielding side — and the actress Sharmila Tagore, the Bengali star of Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar and Hindi-cinema crossover successes like Aradhana. He has two younger sisters, the jewellery designer Saba and the actress and chef Soha. He grew up between the family's haveli in Pataudi, an old princely estate in Haryana, the Tagore family's Calcutta home, and a Mumbai flat in Bandra.

He was sent to Lockers Park preparatory school in Hertfordshire at nine and then to Winchester College, the English boarding school where he was, by his own description, an indifferent student who read history and played a little cricket. He read for a degree at the University of London but did not finish. His father had wanted him to take over the family's tea-estate business in Bhopal. He chose, in 1992, to become a Hindi-film actor instead, and signed his first film, Parampara, directed by Yash Chopra.

His first decade in Hindi cinema was, with two or three exceptions, a sustained commercial disappointment. He played second-lead romantic parts in films that mostly did not work. He has been candid in interviews about the depression of that period, about a brief and acrimonious first marriage to the actress Amrita Singh — they married in 1991, when he was twenty-one and she was thirty-three, and divorced in 2004 — and about the slow process of teaching himself, in his early thirties, what kind of actor he actually wanted to be.

The turn came with Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Farhan Akhtar's directorial debut, in which he played the easygoing, slightly lost middle character among three Bombay friends. It is now considered one of the foundational films of modern Hindi cinema, the moment at which a younger urban Indian audience saw itself on screen for the first time in twenty years. Khan won the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role and, more importantly, was readable to that audience for the first time.

He followed it with Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Hum Tum (2004) — for which he won the National Film Award for Best Actor, in a performance whose comic timing none of his peers could match — and Salaam Namaste (2005). The decisive critical turn was Omkara (2006), Vishal Bhardwaj's Othello adaptation, in which he played Iago — renamed Langda Tyagi — as a small, embittered, grasping Uttar Pradesh enforcer. The performance won him the Filmfare Award for Best Villain and is generally considered one of the finest pieces of Hindi-cinema acting of the 2000s.

He produced his first film, Love Aaj Kal (2009), through his company Illuminati Films, and the company went on to produce Cocktail (2012), Agent Vinod (2012), and Go Goa Gone (2013). The producer side of his career has been less consistent than the acting side, but it has been one of the more interesting in his generation: he has produced more zombie films and offbeat genre experiments than any other major Hindi-cinema star.

He married the actress Kareena Kapoor — daughter of Randhir Kapoor, granddaughter of Raj Kapoor — in Mumbai on 16 October 2012, in a small private ceremony at Bandra Bandstand. They have two sons, Taimur (2016) and Jeh (2021). His daughter Sara, from his first marriage, is herself now a leading Hindi-film actress.

Sacred Games arrived in 2018, on Netflix, and his Sartaj Singh — the Sikh Mumbai police inspector who is the show's straight-arrow protagonist — was the perfect counterpart to Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Ganesh Gaitonde. The show ran for two seasons, was nominated at the International Emmys, and made him, at almost fifty, a streaming-era leading man in a way the Hindi industry had been slow to imagine. He has since worked across television, theatre and film simultaneously, including a memorable horror-comedy turn in Bhoot Police (2021) and the title role in Adipurush (2023), in which he played the demon king Ravana, in a film that was a commercial disappointment but a culture-war flashpoint of the year.

He survived a serious knife attack at his Bandra home in January 2025, was hospitalised, and recovered. He is, at fifty-five, the only contemporary Hindi-film leading man whose memoir, if he ever wrote one, would be a partial history of Indian princely states, English boarding schools and twenty-first century streaming all at once. He has been awarded the Padma Shri (2010) and was photographed, in 2024, walking through Pataudi with his elder son Taimur, holding his hand. The estate, the cinema and the inheritance are now, in some way, one continuous story.