Vidya Balan

Vidya Balan is an Indian actress, born on January 1, 1978, in Ottapalam, Kerala. Trying to break into the Malayalam and Tamil industries, Vidya started her career with sitcoms, commercials, and music videos. Upon making the Hindi film “Parineeta” in 2005, Vidya won Filmfare’s award for Best Female Debut. By 2009, she was being critically acclaimed for her roles in “Paa” (2009), “Ishqiya” (2011), “No One Killed Jessica” (2011), “The Dirty Picture” (2011) won a National Film Award, and “Kahaani” (2012). Vidya has played strong and independent women breaking stereotypes that usually confine Bollywood actresses. Unfortunately, after these hits, Vidya was seen in several unsuccessful movies: “Hamari Adhuri Kahani” (2015), followed by “Te3N”, “Kahaani 2” in 2016, and ‘Begum Jaan” in 2017. This bad cycle was broken with the successful “Tumhari Sulu” (2017), a comedy where a housewife becomes a radio personality. In 2019, Vidya starred in two Telugu biopics playing the wife of N.T. Rama Rao, is a well-known actor turned politician in Andhra Pradesh. She also starred as a scientist in the true story of ‘Mission Mangal’, India’s space mission to Mars. The patriotic film was very successful at the box office and is her highest-grossing film thus far. In 2020, she was flamboyant as ‘Shakuntala Devi’, a biopic about the woman known as the human calculator, for Amazon Prime. In 2021, Vidya was an Indian Forest Service officer in Amazon Prime’s ‘Sherni’ and won a Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress. In 2022, she was a journalist involved in the hit-and-run of her maid’s daughter in ‘Jalsa’ for Amazon Prime. She was last seen in ‘Neeyat’ (2023), with an ensemble cast as an unconventional detective. Vidya is the winner of many acting awards, including the Padma Shri in 2014 from the government of India. Vidya is married to Siddharth Roy Kapur, producer and founder of Roy Kapur Films and President of the Film and Television Producers Guild of India.