Born To Reign

Meet our favourite rebel heart. From taking on bullies to single-handedly delivering box office hits, she’s a real player who likes to live victoriously and has made it on her own terms. Now there’s no stopping her, finds Kaveree Bamzai.

Six stitches. There’s another, the result of a fall on the road when she was eight. It cleaved her lip almost in half and broke her tooth. Four stitches. When she was 12, she was dragged by a motorbike for 13 feet, which got entangled in her skirt. It virtually crushed the left side of her face, broke her left leg, and left countless small scars all over her body. Sixty-four stitches on her leg. It took her a year and half to learn to walk properly again. When she was shooting Tanu Weds Manu (2011), she came under the tyre of the rig she was on, and injured her left foot in three different places. Thirty-four stitches. And most recently on the sets of Manikarnika: The Queen Of Jhansi (2019), she was hit between the eyes by a half-kilo sword. “An artery broke, my face was covered in blood and my forehead was the size of a tennis ball,” she says, laughing. Twenty stitches.

There are other psychological scars, wounds inflicted by herself and by others. “When I started out,” says the 32-year-old, “there weren’t many like me. I came from a small town, I had curly hair, I was skinny, I wasn’t able to express myself well in English, I was feisty, I wanted to be paid as much as the men, and I refused to toe the line. Now the spectrum of the leading lady has stretched from Neena Gupta to Tabu, but it wasn’t so then.” That was 2006, when she burst on to the screen in Anurag Basu’s Gangster (2006), setting the stage for a series of neurotic characters, which reached a peak with Fashion (2008). “The best quality about Kangana as an actor is that the deeper and more human her character’s pain is, the better she is at playing it. And that’s because she has seen enough [pain] in her life to understand it,” says Basu.