Akkineni Nagarjuna, born on 29 August 1959, is an Indian actor best known for Telugu cinema, with a few Hindi and Tamil films as well. He has appeared in more than 90 films and won two National Film Awards, for Ninne Pelladata (1996) and Annamayya (1997). He has also won ten Nandi Awards and three Filmfare Awards South. He is the co-owner of Annapurna Studios and the president of the non-profit Annapurna College of Film and Media in Hyderabad.
He was born at St. Isabel’s Hospital in Madras, now Chennai, into the Telugu-speaking family of the veteran actor Akkineni Nageswara Rao and Annapurna. He was the youngest of five children, and the family is from Ramapuram in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh. The family later moved to Hyderabad, where he went to Hyderabad Public School and Little Flower Junior College. He began a degree in mechanical engineering at the College of Engineering, Guindy, in Madras, where the former cricketer Krishnamachari Srikanth was a college mate, and then completed a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering at Eastern Michigan University.
He first appeared on screen as an infant in Velugu Needalu (1961) and as a child artist in Sudigundalu (1967), both starring his father. His debut as a lead actor was in the 1986 Telugu film Vikram, a remake of the Hindi film Hero, directed by V. Madhusudhana Rao. He followed it with Majnu and Sankeertana, whose music was by Ilaiyaraaja, and in 1988 starred in the blockbuster Aakhari Poratam with Sridevi and Suhasini and in Janaki Ramudu.
The breakthrough came in 1989 with Mani Ratnam’s romantic drama Geetanjali, which won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment, and then Siva, the debut of the director Ram Gopal Varma, which is considered a trendsetter in Telugu cinema and made Nagarjuna a superstar. In 1990 he made his Bollywood debut with the Hindi remake Shiva, which was also a box-office success. He was fondly called the “Celluloid Scientist” for experimenting with different scripts.
Hits through the 1990s include President Gari Pellam (1992), Varasudu (1993), Allari Alludu (1993), Hello Brother (1994) and Gharana Bullodu (1995). In 1996 he produced and starred in Ninne Pelladata opposite Tabu, which won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Telugu and the Filmfare Award for Best Film (Telugu). In Annamayya (1997) he played the 15th-century Telugu composer-poet Annamacharya, which brought him the Filmfare Award for Best Actor (Telugu), his first Nandi Award for Best Actor and a National Award. He also acted in the Tamil film Ratchagan (1997) and the Hindi films Angaaray (1998) and Zakhm (1998), the last alongside Ajay Devgn.
His later hits include Nuvvu Vasthavani and Ninne Premistha (2000), Santosham and Manmadhudu (2002), Sri Ramadasu (2006), Don (2007), King (2008), Manam (2014), Oopiri (2016) and Bangarraju (2022). His work in other languages includes the Hindi film Brahmastra: Part One – Shiva (2022) and the Tamil film Coolie (2025).
He moved into production in 1995, with a production unit in Seychelles, and was a co-director of an Emmy Award-winning animation company, Heart Animation. In 2013 he represented South Indian cinema at the Delhi Film Festival’s celebration of 100 years of Indian cinema. Through Annapurna Studios, which his father founded, and the film school it runs, he has stayed central to Hyderabad’s film industry.
Featured image: Nagarjuna at a TeachAIDS recording session, August 2009 (file photo). Photo by TeachAIDS from Stanford, California, USA, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
