Paresh Rawal

He was born and raised in Bombay in a Gujarati family, finished his education in the city and graduated from Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics in Vile Parle. During those college years he was doing theatre, and that theatre came before films rather than alongside them. That sequence is the whole thing. There is no acting school, no film institute, no father in the industry.

In 1987 he married Swaroop Sampat, the 1979 Miss India winner and an actress in her own right, and they have two sons. The elder, Aditya, debuted as an actor and writer with Bamfaad in 2020. Everything the family knows about performance, it learned in a rehearsal room rather than a classroom.

Arjun in 1985 was the debut and Naam in 1986 was the film that established him, and then came the long stretch that most accounts of his career skip past in a sentence. More than a hundred films through the late eighties and nineties, mostly as the antagonist: Ram Lakhan, Kabzaa, King Uncle, Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja, Dilwale, Daud, Baazi, Mohra, China Gate.

He was doing the same job in Telugu at the same time, and doing it well enough that the hits stack up on their own: Kshana Kshanam in 1991, Govinda Govinda in 1994, Money Money in 1995, Rikshavodu in 1995, Bavagaru Bagunnara in 1998. Two industries, one register, no shortage of work and no critical attention whatsoever. That is the situation a character actor normally retires from.

At the 41st National Film Awards, honouring films of 1993, he won Best Supporting Actor and the award was given for two films at once, Woh Chokri and Sir. The official citation reads, for his performances in the films to reveal contradictory human emotions at the outer and inner levels. That is a jury explicitly rewarding the double act rather than a single performance, which is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly.

The same year, Sir brought him his first Filmfare Award, for Best Performance in a Negative Role, which is Hindi cinema's polite way of saying we noticed the villain. Then came Ketan Mehta's Sardar in 1993, in which he played Vallabhbhai Patel in the lead, and the recognition finally went past the industry. It is worth noticing which prize came from where. The film industry gave him an award for being frightening. The national jury gave him one for being complicated.

Hera Pheri opened in 2000, directed by Priyadarshan, screenplay adapted by the Bhuj-born Gujarati writer Neeraj Vora, and he played Baburao Ganpatrao Apte, a Marathi landlord with a pair of tenants and a wrong number. He won the Filmfare Best Comedian Award for it, and for the rest of the decade the offers came for leads rather than for menace: Nayak, Aankhen with Amitabh Bachchan, Awara Paagal Deewana, Hungama, Hulchul, Garam Masala, Malamaal Weekly, Chup Chup Ke, Welcome, Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, De Dana Dan, Ready.

OMG in 2012 gave him the lead in a film arguing with religion, and the run since then has been steady rather than nostalgic: Sanju in 2018 as Sunil Dutt, Uri in 2019, Soorarai Pottru in Tamil in 2020 and the same role again in the Hindi version Sarfira in 2024, and The Storyteller in 2025 as Satyajit Ray's Tarini Khuro. A Gujarati stage actor playing a Bengali writer's most beloved character is the kind of range that stops being remarkable only because he does it so often.

The Gujarati thread is not a nostalgia clause on this career. His Gujarati play Dear Father was successful on stage and was then adapted into a Gujarati film of the same name, directed by Umang Vyas and released on 4 March 2022, with him leading opposite Manasi Parekh and Chetan Dhanani. He has said in interviews that the timing finally felt right to return to Gujarati cinema after decades away. Very few actors of his size have a film on their record that exists because of a play they did for a regional audience.

Then on 10 September 2020 the President of India appointed him chief of the National School of Drama. Read that against the first act of this page. The institution he never attended, and never needed, handed him the keys. It is the cleanest available argument that a working stage in Bombay taught him everything a training programme would have, and it also happens to be the argument every Gujarati theatre actor on this site has been making for a century.