Alia Bhatt

Alia Bhatt was born into the Hindi film industry in 1993, the daughter of the filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt and the actress Soni Razdan, and she was on screen as a child before she was old enough to have chosen the job: the credits here still list her as a young Reet in Sangharsh. Her adult debut was Student Of The Year in 2012, a glossy Karan Johar teen picture that gave no indication of what followed.

What followed was a run of films built on watchfulness. Bhatt is unusually good at playing a woman who is being managed by other people and is quietly doing the arithmetic anyway: Veera in Highway, the migrant worker in Udta Punjab, Sehmat in Raazi, married into an enemy household and expected to keep functioning. She underplays where the industry's grammar expects volume, and she can hold a close-up without doing anything visible inside it, which is why directors keep handing her scenes with no dialogue to carry.

She has a National Film Award and a shelf of Filmfare trophies, and by the early 2020s she was working at two scales at once: character lead in Gangubai Kathiawadi and Darlings, decoration in the enormous ones, RRR and Brahmastra, where the film has other business. Heart of Stone put her in an English-language action vehicle. Alpha and Love and War are still ahead of her.