🇮🇳 Sanjay Leela Bhansali

He was born in 1963 in a chawl in Bhuleshwar, central Bombay, to Navin Bhansali, a small-scale film producer who lost everything to flops in the 1970s, and Leela Bhansali, a homemaker with an unfailing love of classical music and Lata Mangeshkar. After his father's death and a long bout with alcoholism, the family fell into severe poverty; Sanjay and his sister Bela would later say they grew up watching their mother sew costumes on commission to keep them in school. He signed his name with his mother's in it as a debt to her — Leela in the middle, between Sanjay and Bhansali.

He trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune in editing, then assisted Vidhu Vinod Chopra on Parinda and 1942: A Love Story. His own debut, Khamoshi: The Musical (1996), starred Manisha Koirala and Nana Patekar as deaf parents to a hearing daughter who falls in love with music. It flopped commercially. It is now considered one of the most quietly devastating Indian films ever made and is taught in film schools as a study in restraint, ironic from a director who would soon spend three decades being anything but restrained.

Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) and Devdas (2002) established his vocabulary: orchestrated weeping, plates of food that catch the light, romantic obsession as both wound and worship, women whose costumes carry more story than their dialogue. Devdas opened at Cannes — the first Hindi film to do so out of competition since 1957 — and broke records in the diaspora; its production design alone has been the subject of academic dissertations in India and the UK.

After a strange decade of fewer films and one critical disaster (Saawariya, 2007), he returned with Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013), Bajirao Mastani (2015) and Padmaavat (2018) — the so-called Rajwada trilogy. Each film involved real political backlash; Padmaavat saw sets vandalised in Rajasthan and Bhansali physically assaulted on location in 2017 by a mob from the Rajput Karni Sena. He kept shooting and finished the film, and it became one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of its decade.

He composes most of his own music — he is credited as composer on every film he has directed since Saawariya — and directs his cinematographers as if they were dancers. He fights, often publicly, with his actors. Aishwarya Rai, Ranbir Kapoor, Salman Khan and Priyanka Chopra have all spoken about leaving his sets in tears at least once. And yet Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt have each said separately that he is the director who taught them how to inhabit a frame.

Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar (2024), his Netflix series about the tawaifs of Lahore in the years before Partition, was his largest production ever — eight episodes, eight hundred and fifty days of shooting, the longest sets ever built at Film City Mumbai. It was both his first long-form work and a kind of return to Khamoshi: a story about women who, in losing everything, become the keepers of a culture that erases them.

He has never married and lives with his mother and his sister, dancer-producer Bela Sehgal, in Bandra. He is a private man who has spoken openly about his depressions, his teetotalism, and his belief — Vaishnavite, inherited from his Gujarati Brahmin family — that beauty is a form of devotion. He does not give interviews easily. When he does, he tends to speak only about his mother.