Tabu (born Tabassum Hashmi) is an award-winning Indian film actress, born on November 4, 1971, in Hyderabad, India. She is the niece of iconic actress Shabana Azmi. Tabu started her career as a child in the film ‘Bazaar’ and later in ‘Hum Naujawan’ (1985) when she was fourteen. She acted in several other movies without making much of a mark until ‘Vijaypath’ (1994) with Ajay Devgan. Tabu received the Filmfare Best Female Debut Award for this film. In 1996, she won a National Film Award for Best Actress for ‘Maachis’, portraying a woman caught in a Sikh insurgency. In 1997, she won the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress for the movie ‘Virasat’. Other award-winning films are: ‘Hu Tu Tu’ (1999), ‘Astitva’ (2000), ‘Chandni Bar’ (2001), and ‘Cheeni Kum’ (2007). Tabu has also done two Hollywood movies, ‘The Namesake’ and ‘Life of Pi’, as well as, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, and Bengali films. In 2014, she won critical praise and a Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress, as Shahid Kapoor’s mother in the Vishal Bhardwaj version of Hamlet, ‘Haider’. Tabu can currently be seen in ‘Golmaal Again’ (2017), the fourth installment of the Golmaal series. It recently became the highest-grossing film of 2017.
