On his 69th birthday, a portrait of Annu Kapoor, the most under-celebrated genius in the history of Indian entertainment
Sanjay Shah
There is a detail about Annu Kapoor that Bollywood, in its eternal obsession with manufactured rags-to-riches myth, has somehow failed to sufficiently dramatise. His great-grandfather, Lala Ganga Ram Kapoor, was hanged by the British for revolutionary activity during India’s freedom struggle. His grandfather, Dr Kripa Ram Kapoor, served as a doctor in the British Indian Army, the quiet, dutiful counterweight to the rebel. His mother, Kamal Shabnam Kapoor, was a Bengali Brahmin in a Punjabi household, a poet, a trained classical singer, and an Urdu teacher who earned Rs 40 a month. His father, Madanlal Kapoor, owned a travelling Parsi theatre company, which his own mother threw him out of the house for running.
Anil Kapoor, that is the name on the birth certificate, issued on 20 February 1956 in Itwara, Bhopal, grew up in the slipstream of all this. Rebellion and restraint. Art and poverty. A grandmother who considered theatre shameful, and a father who refused to stop performing. That contradiction did not break the boy. It built him. The man the world came to know as Annu Kapoor, actor, director, television host, radio voice, and keeper of Hindi cinema’s institutional memory, carries every gram of that inheritance in every role he has ever played.
He turns 69 today. It is high time someone wrote about him properly. So, here we go…
Chai, Churan, and the Road to the National School
Before the National Film Award, before Antakshari made him a household presence in 70 million Indian homes, before Shyam Benegal wrote him a letter… There was tea.
Annu Kapoor has spoken plainly about those years: “I have only sold tea, not the whole country. I have driven auto-rickshaws, sold churan and lottery tickets. I have also sold firecrackers. But whatever I have done in life, I have done it honestly and with the intention of earning a living.” That sentence, delivered without self-pity in a 2025 interview with TV9 Bharatvarsh, tells you everything about the man’s moral spine. He did not romanticise poverty. He simply refused to be defined by it.
He had wanted, as a child, to become a surgeon or an IAS officer. His family could not afford either. He left school after Class 10. He joined his father’s theatre troupe, travelling the towns and small cities of northern India, performing in Parsi plays, Laila Majnu, Harischandra, Shirin-Farhad, to audiences who had paid a few rupees for an evening’s transport away from their own lives. It was, as educational experiences go, more comprehensive than any classroom.
In 1976, his elder brother Ranjit Kapoor, already a student at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, insisted he apply. He did. He got in. The NSD was, and remains, one of those rare Indian institutions that genuinely changed the people who passed through it. For Annu Kapoor, it was the place where a boy who sold firecrackers discovered that he could play a 70-year-old man with enough conviction to make a veteran film director reach for his pen.
That director was Shyam Benegal. The play was Ek Ruka Hua Faisla. The letter that followed led to Mandi in 1983, and a career that, measured in its breadth and its seriousness, has almost no parallel in Hindi cinema.
The Character Actor’s Burden, and Gift
Indian cinema has always understood stars. It has rarely understood actors. The star is a fixed point around which narratives orbit; the actor is the one who fills in the gravitational field between those fixed points and makes the whole universe feel real. Annu Kapoor spent four decades doing precisely that, and doing it with a versatility that borders on the alarming.
Consider the range, and consider it carefully. He played Mahatma Gandhi in Ketan Mehta’s Sardar (1993) and Veer Savarkar in Kaala Pani (1996) – two diametrically opposed figures in India’s political imagination, each requiring not merely a costume change but a fundamental recalibration of moral posture. He played Saint Kabir in a DD National television serial, a role demanding the meditative stillness of a 15th-century mystic poet. He played a newspaper editor in Shekhar Kapur’s Mr. India (1987) with comic timing that made the film’s supporting architecture feel load-bearing. He played, in Vishal Bharadwaj’s 7 Khoon Maaf (2011), a police inspector navigating the moral wreckage left by Priyanka Chopra’s serial-killer character, a role requiring him to be, simultaneously, suspicious, tender, and complicit.
None of these performances are footnotes. Each is a study in craft.
But it is Dr. Baldev Chaddha in Shoojit Sircar’s Vicky Donor (2012) that stands as his defining screen achievement, and perhaps the most improbable one. A sperm-bank physician who is simultaneously obsessive, mercenary, warm, and unexpectedly moving, Chaddha could easily have been a caricature. Annu Kapoor made him a person. The film, written by Juhi Chaturvedi, was itself an act of artistic courage – a mainstream Hindi comedy built around sperm donation, a subject Indian cinema had previously treated as unmentionable. His performance won him the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor at the 60th National Film Awards in 2013, the Filmfare Award, the IIFA Award, and the Screen Award in the same category. It was a clean sweep in a year when the industry had no choice but to acknowledge what it had been quietly ignoring for three decades.
He has acknowledged honestly that as a character actor, he did not always have the luxury of choosing roles the way Amitabh Bachchan or Salman Khan could. But he was proud to be part of Vicky Donor, praising its original concept and the work of director Shoojit Sircar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi. That acknowledgement, unsentimental, exact, is itself characteristic. Annu Kapoor has never pretended that the film industry’s hierarchy is anything other than what it is. He simply built an extraordinary career within its constraints.
The Antakshari Nation
In 1993, Zee TV launched a musical game show that would run for thirteen years, become a cultural institution, outlast the decade that produced it, and enter the living rooms of Indians across every social and economic stratum. Antakshari was not, on paper, a complicated concept. Teams sang songs beginning with the last syllable of the previous team’s song – a parlour game with roots in the Sanskrit Gurukul tradition, elevated here to national television. What made it extraordinary was the man holding the microphone.
Kapoor has recalled how the show transformed his financial circumstances: “It shifted me from Rs. 750 or Rs. 1,000 rent to 1BHK home. There was music and no script. What I used to say, I used to say it with responsibility. And I used to connect with the public.” That connection was not incidental. It was the product of a man who had spent years in Parsi theatre learning how to read a live audience, hold their attention, and pivot when the room shifted. Television was simply a larger theatre.
He compared Antakshari to Ramayan, Mahabharat, and Buniyaad – shows built on homegrown ideas that resonated with audiences, unlike the many programmes that were copied or adapted from foreign formats. That comparison is not vanity. It is accurate. Antakshari was an original Indian format, rooted in an Indian tradition, hosted by a man with encyclopaedic knowledge of Hindi film music and a performer’s instinct for when to step forward and when to let the moment breathe.
The show ran from 1993 to 2006, 13 years, which in Indian television terms is closer to a geological epoch than a run. It was relaunched in 2007. It has since migrated to radio, where Annu Kapoor has been hosting Suhaana Safar on 92.7 Big FM, a daily programme broadcast nationally across every Hindi-speaking radio network, for over a decade. The tagline, Filmy Duniya Ki Kahi Ankahi Kahaniya, is not a marketing copy. It is a genuine promise, delivered by a man who knows those stories from the inside. He has read the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Quran – 14 times each, by his own account. He was, had circumstances allowed it, headed for medicine or the civil services. That intellectual seriousness went somewhere. It went into every anecdote, every musical annotation, every quiet correction of a half-remembered fact on air.
The Name He Had to Change
There is one detail that Indians who were not paying attention in 1984 often miss. Annu Kapoor’s real name is Anil Kapoor. He changed it for the most pragmatic of reasons: when he was cast in Mashaal (1984), his payment cheque was accidentally swapped with that of another rising actor named Anil Kapoor, who would go on to become one of Bollywood’s biggest stars. Shabana Azmi and others in the industry suggested the rename. He became Annu, the nickname he had carried since childhood!
The symmetry is almost too neat for a screenplay. Two men named Anil Kapoor, born in the same decade, both destined for significant careers, one in the blinding light of stardom and one in the more lasting, if quieter, light of craft. India knows both. It has, perhaps, not yet fully reckoned with the second.
Sixty-Nine, and Still Building
On 20 February 2026, Annu Kapoor turned 69. He arrived in Mumbai in 1982 with Rs 419.25 in his pocket – that specific figure, preserved in interviews with the exactness of a man who remembers what it felt like to count change. He has, since then, appeared in over a hundred films, directed theatre productions, produced and directed the children’s film Abhay (1994), for which he won a second National Award, hosted one of the longest-running television programmes in Indian history, and built a radio presence that reaches crores of listeners daily.
He has read the sacred texts of three religions. He once smoked twenty cigarettes a day; he quit in 2007. He has spoken publicly about believing in euthanasia, about being an atheist despite being born into a Hindu family, about not fitting into politics despite being, in his own words, a good patriot. He is not a man who manages his public image. He is a man who simply says what he thinks, and trusts that the body of his work will speak more clearly than any controversy.
His great-grandfather was hanged for refusing to be silent when silence was the safer option. Seventy-odd years later, that bloodline produced a man who sells – not the country, as he was careful to clarify – but something harder to commodify: the memory of what Indian cinema once was, the standard of what Indian acting can be, and the reminder that the most enduring careers in this industry have always been built not on fame, but on the relentless, unglamorous insistence on doing the work right.
The chai seller from Bhopal. The antakshari-wala of a nation. The quiet National Award winner who swept four trophies in a single year for playing a sperm bank doctor with more humanity than most heroes bring to their star vehicles.
Happy birthday, Annu Kapoor. Bollywood has not deserved you. India, on the other hand, has been lucky to have you.
Summary
- Annu Kapoor was born on 20 February 1956 in Itwara, Bhopal, into a family marked by extraordinary contrasts: his great-grandfather Lala Ganga Ram Kapoor was hanged during India’s freedom struggle; his mother earned Rs 40 a month as a teacher and poet.
- Born Anil Kapoor, he changed his professional name in 1984 after his payment cheque was accidentally swapped with that of actor Anil Kapoor during the filming of Mashaal. Shabana Azmi was among those who suggested the rename.
- He sold tea, drove auto-rickshaws, sold churan, firecrackers, and lottery tickets before joining the National School of Drama in 1976 on his brother Ranjit Kapoor’s insistence. He moved to Mumbai in 1982 with exactly Rs 419.25.
- His screen range is virtually unmatched among character actors of his generation: Mahatma Gandhi in Sardar, Veer Savarkar in Kaala Pani, Saint Kabir on DD National, and Dr Baldev Chaddha in Vicky Donor roles spanning 15th-century mystics to contemporary fertility specialists.
- His performance in Vicky Donor (2012) earned him a clean sweep at India’s four major film awards: the National Film Award, Filmfare Award, IIFA Award, and Screen Award, all for Best Supporting Actor.
- Antakshari, which he hosted from 1993 to 2006 on Zee TV, was one of the longest-running original Indian television formats. He has compared its cultural standing to Ramayan, Mahabharat, and Buniyaad.
- His daily radio programme Suhaana Safar with Annu Kapoor on 92.7 Big FM has run for over a decade, broadcasting nationally across all Hindi-speaking radio networks with the tagline Filmy Duniya Ki Kahi Ankahi Kahaniya.
- He is a self-declared atheist who has read the Vedas, Upanishads, and the Quran fourteen times each. He quit a twenty-cigarettes-a-day smoking habit in 2007.
- He directed and produced the children’s film Abhay (1994), starring Nana Patekar, and won the National Award for Best Children’s Film for it making him a two-time National Award winner across acting and direction.
- Turning 69 on 20 February 2026, Annu Kapoor remains one of Indian entertainment’s most intellectually rigorous and morally consistent presences, a reminder that careers built on craft outlast careers built on stardom.
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