Konkona Sen Sharma, born on 3 December 1979, is an Indian actor and filmmaker who works mainly in Bengali and Hindi films. She has won two National Film Awards and three Filmfare Awards. The daughter of the filmmaker and actress Aparna Sen, she is mainly known for independent films, along with mainstream work, and she made her directorial debut with A Death in the Gunj (2017), which won her the Filmfare Award for Best Debut Director.
Her father, Mukul Sharma, was a science writer and journalist, and her mother is Aparna Sen. She has an elder sister, Kamalini Chatterjee. Her maternal grandfather, Chidananda Dasgupta, was a film critic, scholar and writer and a co-founder of the Calcutta Film Society, and her grandmother Supriya Dasgupta was a cousin of the modern Bengali poet Jibanananda Das. She studied at Modern High School for Girls and graduated in English from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, in 2001.
She made her debut as a child artist in the Bengali film Indira (1983) and appeared as a teenager in Amodini (1994). Her first leading role as an adult was in the Bengali thriller Ek Je Aachhe Kanya (2000), in which she played a negative character, followed by Rituparno Ghosh’s Titli (2002) opposite Mithun Chakraborty and her mother. Her breakthrough was the English-language drama Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002), directed by her mother, with Rahul Bose, a story of two strangers on a bus journey during communal violence. Her performance as a Tamil housewife, and her mastery of the accent, won her the National Film Award for Best Actress and was later included in Filmfare’s “Top 80 Iconic Performances”.
In 2005 she made her Hindi debut in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Page 3, as a journalist, which won her the Zee Cine Award for Best Female Debut, and starred in her mother’s 15 Park Avenue as a mentally ill woman, with Waheeda Rehman and Shabana Azmi. She then played a middle-aged village woman in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006), with Ajay Devgn, Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan, which won her the National Film Award and the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress, and followed it with a second Filmfare supporting award for Life in a… Metro (2007).
In 2006 she made her first short film as a director, the 18-minute Bengali Naamkoron, for the Kala Ghoda Film Festival, and starred with Prosenjit Chatterjee in Rituparno Ghosh’s Dosar, which won her the Best Actress award at the New York Indian Film Festival. In 2007 she played a street prostitute in Traffic Signal, and she was offered the lead in Mira Nair’s The Namesake but could not take it up because of clashing dates.
Her other notable work includes Laaga Chunari Mein Daag (2007), Luck By Chance (2009), Wake Up Sid (2009) and Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge? (2010), and starring roles in Ek Thi Daayan (2013), Goynar Baksho (2014), Talvar (2015) and Lipstick Under My Burkha (2017). She received praise for the anthology film Ajeeb Daastaans (2021) and for directing a segment of Lust Stories 2 (2023).
Having moved between Kolkata and Mumbai, between Bengali films and Hindi cinema and between acting and directing, she has built one of the more respected careers in Indian independent cinema.
Featured image: Konkona Sen Sharma with the director Jaydeep Sarkar, April 2014 (file photo). Photo by Sarkar Jaydeep, licensed under CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
