page_title: Vidya Balan
section_title: Professional expansion (2019–present)
hierarchical_section_title: Vidya Balan / Career / Professional expansion (2019–present)
caption_attribution_description: English: Vidya Balan promoting Mission Mangal in 2019
context_page_description: Vidya Balan is an Indian actress. Known for pioneering a change in the portrayal of women in Hindi cinema with her roles in female-led films, she is the recipient of several awards, including a National Film Award and six Filmfare Awards. She was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2014.
  Vidya aspired to a career in film from a young age and had her first acting role in the 1995 sitcom Hum Paanch. While pursuing a master's degree in sociology from the University of Mumbai, she made several unsuccessful attempts to start a career in film, and featured in television commercials and music videos. She made her film debut by starring in the Bengali film Bhalo Theko and received praise for her first Hindi film, the drama Parineeta. This was followed by commercial successes in Lage Raho Munna Bhai and Bhool Bhulaiyaa, but her roles in the romantic comedies Heyy Babyy and Kismat Konnection had negative reviews.
  Vidya went on to establish herself by starring in five consecutive commercial successes, which also earned her critical and awards recognition.
context_section_description: Vidya expanded into South Indian cinema in 2019, with roles in the two-part Telugu biopic, titled N.T.R: Kathanayakudu and N.T.R: Mahanayakudu (2019), and the Tamil drama Nerkonda Paarvai. In the former two, which form the biographical account of actor-politician N. T. Rama Rao, she played Rao's first wife. Both films failed commercially. In Nerkonda Paarvai, a remake of the courtroom drama Pink (2016), she briefly played the wife of Ajith Kumar's character. Although usually not keen on remakes, she agreed to the project to bring attention to its theme of sexual consent. Srinivasa Ramanujam of The Hindu thought that the portions involving Vidya were inessential to the story. It emerged as one of the highest-grossing Tamil films of the year. 
  In the same year, Vidya teamed with Akshay Kumar for the third time in Mission Mangal, about the Mars Orbiter Mission, which marked India's first interplanetary expedition. She liked the idea of playing Tara Shinde, a seemingly ordinary homemaker who balances her family life with her work as a scientist, and she was also pleased to work with four other leading ladies. Joe Leydon of Variety found Vidya to be "drop-dead perfect from wire to wire" and Nandini Ramnath of Scroll.in wrote that she "perfectly conveys Tara’s optimism and dedication, and hers is the only female character who has agency in this space agency saga". She received another Best Actress nomination at Filmfare. With global earnings of ₹2.9 billion (US$41 million), Mission Mangal emerged as her highest-grossing release.
  The short film Natkhat (2020), a drama about a mother teaching her young son about gender equality, marked Vidya's first production venture. It premiered on YouTube as part of the We Are One: A Global Film Festival. She then portrayed the mental calculator Shakuntala Devi in an eponymous biopic, which due to the COVID-19 pandemic could not release theatrically and instead streamed on Prime Video. The director Anu Menon cast Vidya as she believed that Devi's "gregarious and flamboyant" personality matched that of the actress; in preparation, Vidya listened to taped interviews of Devi's daughter and husband, and watched online videos of Devi. Mike McCahill of The Guardian praised Vidya's "all-shotguns-blazing performance" and The Hindu's Kenneth Rosario took note of her "ability to smoothly transition between age and appearances, but even she can’t salvage a rather mawkish finale to the film".
  Vidya will next star in Amit V. Masurkar's satire Sherni, and has committed to produce and star as Indira Gandhi in a yet-untitled web series based on Sagarika Ghose's biography Indira – India's Most Powerful Prime Minister.
caption: Vidya promoting Mission Mangal in 2019
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