ਕਿਰਨ ਖੇਰਕਿਰਨ ਖੇਰ

Kirron Kher (born 14 June 1952) is an Indian actress and politician, raised in Chandigarh in a Punjabi Sikh family, who won two National Film Awards and then became Hindi cinema's best known screen mother in films such as Devdas and Rang De Basanti. From 2014 to 2024 she served as Chandigarh's Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha.

Early life in Chandigarh and a sporting family

She was born Kiran Thakar Singh Sandhu on 14 June 1952 in Bangalore and grew up in Chandigarh, where her father Thakar Singh Sandhu and mother Diljit Kaur raised the family. Sport and performance ran through the house: at school she was a keen badminton player, her sister Kanwal Thakar Kaur became an Arjuna Award winning badminton player, and her mother had acted and played sport in her own college days before Partition.

She went to school in Jabalpur and finished her schooling in Chandigarh, then graduated from the Department of Indian Theatre at Panjab University. The department, founded and headed in that era by the playwright ਬਲਵੰਤ ਗਾਰਗੀ, gave her a serious stage training before cinema found her. In 2003, acting on numerological belief, she changed the spelling of her first name from Kiran to Kirron, the form she has used since.

A slow start, a long break and a stage comeback

Her film debut came in the Punjabi film Aasra Pyar Da in 1983, which drew good notices. What followed was not a rise but a pause. Through the 1980s she tried to find a footing in Mumbai without success, and after her first marriage ended she stepped away to raise her son Sikandar, appearing in only one film in those years, Pestonjee, in a small role alongside Anupam Kher.

The break years were not wasted. She worked behind the scenes, including as a costume designer for Anupam Kher, and she is credited with suggesting the title of his film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in 1995. Her return to acting came through theatre in the mid 1990s, in the play Saalgirah, written by Javed Siddiqui and directed by Feroz Abbas Khan, and then through television, where she hosted Purushkshetra on Zee TV, a show noted for discussing women's issues and alternative sexuality openly, followed by Kirron Kher Today and Jagte Raho with Kirron Kher.

Why did Kirron Kher win two National Film Awards?

She won them for the two performances that relaunched her. In Shyam Benegal's Sardari Begum (1996) she played a thumri singer whose life unfolds in flashback, and the performance earned her the National Film Award's Special Jury Award in 1997. In Rituparno Ghosh's Bengali film Bariwali (1999) she played Banalata, a lonely middle aged woman who rents her house to a film crew, and won the National Film Award for Best Actress.

The Bariwali award drew a public dispute when a Bengali actress, Rita Koiral, said she had dubbed part of the role and should share the honour. Kher answered that she had rehearsed her Bengali dialogue for hours herself, and the award was not shared. The episode shows the seriousness with which she approached a role in a language that was not her own.

A third performance fixed her international standing. In Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters, 2003), set between Partition and 1979 Pakistan, she played a Sikh woman who survives abduction and builds a new life. She won Best Actress at the Locarno International Film Festival, where the film also took the top prize, and at the Karachi festival, along with a Lux Style Award.

Hindi cinema's favourite mother

From 2002, mainstream Hindi cinema claimed her. As Sumitra in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas (2002) she was nominated for the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress and won the IIFA award in that category. A run of defining supporting roles followed: Main Hoon Na, Hum Tum and Veer-Zaara in 2004, Mangal Pandey: The Rising in 2005, and in 2006 Rang De Basanti, where her Mitro, the mother of the hero DJ, anchored the film's emotional centre, along with Fanaa and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna.

Comedy became the other half of the persona, in Singh Is Kinng and Dostana in 2008, the latter bringing a fourth Filmfare nomination. In October 2004 she and Anupam Kher even guest starred in the American medical drama ER, playing the mother of Parminder Nagra's character. From 2009 she became a fixture of prime time television as a judge on India's Got Talent, a role she held until 2023 and which made her face familiar well beyond film audiences.

She also came home to Punjabi cinema. In Punjab 1984 (2014), a drama set in Punjab's militancy years, she played Satwant Kaur, a mother searching for her missing son. ਦਿਲਜੀਤ ਦੋਸਾਂਝ played the son, in a cast that also included ਸੋਨਮ ਬਾਜਵਾ, and Kher won the critics' Best Actress award at the PTC Punjabi Film Awards. It was a reminder, late in her film career, of where she had started in 1983.

Parliament: Chandigarh's MP from 2014 to 2024

Politics grew out of activism. She worked with the Laadli campaign against female infanticide and with the Roko Cancer awareness campaign, and she joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2009. In the 2014 general election the party fielded her from Chandigarh, the city she calls home, and she defeated the sitting Congress MP Pawan Kumar Bansal, polling 1,91,362 votes to his 1,21,720.

As MP she pressed for a film city for Chandigarh, a proposal the Chandigarh Administration accepted with a site at Sarangpur, though land remained difficult. She was re-elected in 2019 by a margin of 46,970 votes, and she served in the Lok Sabha until her term ended on 4 June 2024.

Illness, stepping back, and what she leaves behind

In 2020 she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a form of blood cancer, and she spent about a year in Mumbai under treatment. Before the 2024 election she told interviewers that she had herself asked the party leadership to let her sit out that contest: she had recovered, she said, but she had lost a year in Chandigarh to illness and did not want her party to suffer for her absence. It was a decision stated in her own words, not a dropping, and she continued her television work through the same period.

Her personal life is woven into her career. She married Mumbai businessman Gautam Berry in 1979 and had her son Sikandar, now an actor. After that marriage ended in divorce in 1985, she married Anupam Kher, whom she had first met as a student at the Department of Indian Theatre in Chandigarh in 1974 and worked with in the play Chandpuri Ki Champabai. They married on 26 August 1985, and the partnership has lasted four decades.

Kher's legacy is the span itself. She proved that an actress written off by the industry in her thirties could return in her forties to win the country's highest acting honours, that a supporting performer could carry a film's heart, and that a theatre trained artist from Chandigarh could hold a parliamentary seat for a decade. Few Indian public figures have rebuilt themselves so completely, three times over.