Anant Nag

Born to Anandi and Sadanand Nagarkatte, this guy’s got roots all the way back in coastal Karnataka, where school days were basically shaped by Anand Ashram and Chitrapur math. Then, off to Bombay—because why not?—where he ended up knee-deep in amateur theatre for a good eight years. Not a bad way to spend your youth, honestly. His big break? The Kannada film "Sankalpa" in 1971, thanks to the legends G. V. Iyer and Girish Karnad. Things just kind of took off from there. Once in Bombay, Satyadev Dubey pointed him toward Shyam Benegal, and boom—"Ankur" (1974), his first Hindi film. That decade was basically a whirlwind, with Benegal tossing him diverse roles in stuff like "Nishant," "Bhumika," "Manthan," "Kondra," and "Kaliyug." And it wasn’t just Benegal—he worked with heavyweights like M S Sathyu, Girish Karnad, and Vikas Desai. Plus, he dove into TV and movies inspired by R. K. Narayan’s work, produced and directed by his own brother, the late Shankar Nag. The guy’s got numbers, too—over 175 Kannada films, plus a bunch in Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi. No shocker, he’s bagged the Karnataka State Best Actor Award four times (and a handful of Filmfare Awards, too). On top of all that, politics called—he was a big part of the Janatha Party experiment, served in the Karnataka Legislative Council and Assembly, and even took on a minister role. These days, he’s picky with projects—recently showing up in Mani Ratnam’s "Yuva" and working on "Man Eater of Malgudi" with Kavitha Lankesh.