Early Life and Background
Vidya Balan was born on 1 January 1978 in Ottapalam, a town in the Palakkad District of Kerala, to P. R. Balan, currently the Vice President of ETC India, and Saraswathy Balan, a homemaker. According to Balan, they speak a mix of Tamil and Malayalam at home; she is also well versed in Hindi, Marathi, English and Bengali. Her elder sister, Priya Balan, works in the field of advertising.
Balan grew up in the suburban neighbourhood of Chembur, Mumbai and was schooled at St. Anthony Girls' High School. Balan aspired to make a career in film from a young age and was inspired by the work of actors Shabana Azmi and Madhuri Dixit. At the age of sixteen, Balan starred in the first season of Ekta Kapoor's sitcom Hum Paanch, as Radhika, a bespectacled teenager. Following the success of the show, Balan refused Anurag Basu's offer to star as the lead of a television soap opera, as she wanted to concentrate on making a film career. Her parents were supportive of her decision to become an actress, but encouraged her to complete her education first. She thus attended St. Xavier's College to pursue a bachelor's degree in sociology and later earned a master's degree from the University of Mumbai.
Read more about this topic: Vidya Balan
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or background:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)