Shobana

A niece of the Travancore sisters, Padmini, Lalitha and Ragini, Shobana was born Shobana Chandrakumar Pillai on 21 March in Thiruvananthapuram. She is an actor and a Bharatanatyam dancer. Malayalam cinema sits at the centre of her work, though she has also acted in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, English and Kannada films, more than 230 titles over four decades. She started as a child artist and won a Best Child Artiste award for the Tamil film Mangala Nayagi (1980). Her adult debut came in 1984 with Balachandra Menon's April 18, the same year she began in Tamil with Enakkul Oruvan. Two National Film Awards for Best Actress followed, for Manichitrathazhu (1993), which also won her the Kerala State Film Award for Best Actress, and for the English-language Mitr, My Friend (2001). Innale (1990) and Thenmavin Kombathu (1994), where she played Karthumbi opposite Mohanlal, earned her Filmfare Awards South. She trained under Chitra Visweswaran and Padma Subrahmanyam and runs the dance school Kalarpana in Chennai. The Padma Shri came in 2006, the Padma Bhushan in 2025. Lately she has played Mariam in Kalki 2898 AD (2024) and Lalitha Shanmugham in Thudarum (2025). She is cast as Ravana's mother in Ramayana: Rise of a Legend, and Thenmavin Kombathu is back in theatres in a 4K version.