Tabu

Few actors in Indian cinema have been trusted with as much difficulty as Tabu. Born Tabassum Fatima Hashmi in Hyderabad in 1971, she has worked primarily in Hindi film but never only there, moving between Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam productions from early on, and her accolades reflect the spread: two National Film Awards, seven Filmfare Awards, two Filmfare Awards South, and the Padma Shri, India's fourth highest civilian honour, in 2011.

The thing she does better than almost anyone is play a woman whose composure is doing enormous work. She is Nimmi in Maqbool and Ghazala Meer in Haider, two of the most demanding parts written for an Indian actress in the last twenty five years, and Simi in Andhadhun, where she is charm and threat in the same breath and the film's best scenes belong entirely to her. As IG Meera Deshmukh she has anchored the police side of Drishyam, Drishyam 2 and Drishyam 3, and the reason that character keeps being written back in is that she plays the institutional side of a story without ever letting it go bloodless.

She has also always refused to be only a serious actress, which is why the same filmography contains Hera Pheri, Biwi No.1, Golmaal Again, Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 and Crew. And she is the reason the film of The Namesake works: as Ashima Ganguli she has to age across decades and carry an immigrant marriage that the film mostly declines to explain, and she does it almost entirely with posture and pauses.