Kareena Kapoor Khan, the Kapoor heir who made instinct her only method

Kareena Kapoor Khan

Photo: Bollywood Hungama / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 21, 1980 Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Occupation	Actress and producer
Known for	3 Idiots, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham
Awards	3 Filmfare · Filmfare Special Performance · 2 Filmfare Critics

Directors who have worked with Kareena Kapoor Khan tend to describe the same thing, and it is not a technique. Rajkumar Hirani, who directed her opposite Aamir Khan, has said she insisted on skipping rehearsals because they would take the spontaneity out of a scene. Karan Johar put it more bluntly: she has no craft, grammar or process attached to her acting, only a great sense of cinema. Rensil D’Silva, who made Kurbaan with her, found that talking a scene through actually harmed it. For most of her career that instinct was the product. The open question now is what happens when an actor built on impulse starts choosing parts that ask her to hold everything back.

That is the bet behind her recent run of detectives and police officers, from a grieving investigator in Buckinghamshire to DCP Ajooni Kohli in Meghna Gulzar’s Daayra, the crime drama now playing in Indian cinemas. The reviews for Daayra praised her control. The box office did not follow, and the film recorded the weakest opening day of her career. Both facts belong to the same story: a star trying to be taken seriously on terms that her own early success made difficult.

A name borrowed from Tolstoy

The family she arrived into, in Bombay on 21 September 1980, is the one people mean when they talk about Hindi cinema’s first dynasty. Her great-grandfather was Prithviraj Kapoor, her grandfather Raj Kapoor, her father the actor and director Randhir Kapoor and her mother the actress Babita. Her elder sister, Karisma Kapoor, was already a star while Kareena was still at school, and the actor Ranbir Kapoor is her cousin. Even her first name came from a book on the family shelf: her mother was reading Anna Karenina while pregnant.

For a Kapoor, films were never the unusual choice. The detours were. She studied at Jamnabai Narsee School in Mumbai and at Welham Girls’ School in Dehradun, spent two years on a commerce degree at Mithibai College, took a three-month microcomputers course at Harvard Summer School and completed a year at Government Law College in Mumbai before dropping law for acting classes with Kishore Namit Kapoor.

Poo, and the problem with Poo

Her debut came in J. P. Dutta’s Refugee in 2000, a love story set against the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, opposite Abhishek Bachchan, who was also making his first film. It won her the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut. A year later Karan Johar cast her as Poo in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, a spoilt, sharp-tongued, fashion-obsessed Delhi girl who stole a family melodrama from a cast that included Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. The film earned more than one billion rupees worldwide. In the same year she played opposite Shah Rukh Khan in Santosh Sivan’s Asoka, which screened at the Venice and Toronto film festivals.

What followed is the part of the story that later profiles tend to skip. Across 2002 and 2003 she made six films, among them Mujhse Dosti Karoge!, Khushi, Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon and LOC Kargil, and none of them worked with critics or audiences. Reviewers complained that she was playing variations on Poo. At twenty-three, the most talked-about newcomer of her generation had already been typecast.

The reinvention

The correction was deliberate. In Sudhir Mishra’s Chameli she played a Mumbai sex worker who spends one rain-soaked night talking to a stranger, and she visited red-light districts to study the women she was playing. The role won her a Filmfare Special Performance Award and is still treated as the turning point of her career. Govind Nihalani’s Dev, the same year, brought the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress. In 2006 she won it again for Dolly, the Desdemona figure in Vishal Bhardwaj‘s Omkara, his adaptation of Othello set in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh.

Then came Geet. Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, opposite Shahid Kapoor, gave her a talkative, impulsive Punjabi girl who boards the wrong train and changes a stranger’s life, and it won her the Filmfare Award for Best Actress. Geet became a template that Hindi romantic comedies copied for years, and it fused the actress and the character in the public mind more completely than Poo ever had.

The blockbuster years

The next stretch made her one of the most bankable women in the industry. Hirani’s 3 Idiots, in which she played Pia opposite Aamir Khan, became the highest-grossing Bollywood film up to that point. Golmaal 3 passed one billion rupees at home, Bodyguard with Salman Khan was the biggest Indian earner of 2011, and Ra.One with Shah Rukh Khan grossed more than 2.4 billion rupees worldwide. In between, We Are Family brought her a Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress, her sixth Filmfare trophy, and Kurbaan, 3 Idiots, Golmaal 3 and later Heroine all earned Best Actress nominations.

The more interesting work of the period sat slightly off that line. In Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine she played a fading film star coming apart in public, a performance Bollywood Hungama called her best to date. Reema Kagti’s Talaash, a ghost story disguised as a police thriller, reunited her with Aamir Khan. In Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab she was a doctor treating addicts in a state swamped by drugs, in a film the Central Board of Film Certification initially rejected and that reached cinemas only after the Bombay High Court cleared it with a single cut. The same years gave her Rasika in Kabir Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan, the top-earning Indian film of 2015.

The star and the tabloid version

There is a less flattering reading of all this, and it is worth stating plainly. Her critics’ awards came for small, difficult films; her fortune came mostly from vehicles built around Aamir Khan, Salman Khan or Shah Rukh Khan, in which she was often the romantic interest and little more. For long periods the conversation about her was not about acting at all. The weight she lost for the Yash Raj caper Tashan, which flopped, turned “size zero” into an Indian tabloid phrase, and she has since talked openly about that film’s failure. Kambakkht Ishq made money and was savaged. Her public persona, outspoken and unbothered by the press, has helped her stay famous through flops, but it has also made it easy to treat her as a personality first and a performer second.

The recent films have not settled the argument. Her deglamourised detective work has earned respect without earning crowds, and some critics remain unconvinced by the pivot itself: reviewing Daayra for The Hollywood Reporter India, Rahul Desai found her miscast, with unfavourable echoes of Poo. Even her books have drawn fire. In May 2024 the Madhya Pradesh High Court issued her a notice on a petition objecting to the word “Bible” in the title of her 2021 book on pregnancy; her lawyers replied that it was never meant to hurt anyone’s religious sentiments.

A second life for women-led films

Her commercial answer to the “romantic interest” problem came through ensemble comedies led by women. Veere Di Wedding, with Sonam Kapoor, Swara Bhasker and Shikha Talsania, crossed 1.38 billion rupees worldwide and became the highest-grossing female-led Hindi film of its time. Good Newwz, a fertility-clinic comedy with Akshay Kumar, passed three billion rupees. She appeared in Angrezi Medium, the last film Irrfan Khan completed, and then in Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha, the Indian remake of Forrest Gump, which disappointed at the box office. In 2024 the heist comedy Crew, with Tabu and Kriti Sanon, became one of the most successful films of her career, and she returned to Rohit Shetty’s police universe as Avni in Singham Again.

Detectives in a quieter key

The streaming era gave her the roles the multiplex had not. Sujoy Ghosh’s Jaane Jaan, a Netflix adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X, cast her as Maya D’Souza, a single mother tangled in a killing. The Hindu praised her brisk, unfussy performance, and the film became the most-watched Indian film on Netflix in 2023 by global viewing hours.

She pushed further with Hansal Mehta’s The Buckingham Murders, her first English-language film and her first as a producer. She played Detective Sergeant Jaspreet “Jazz” Bhamra, a British Indian officer investigating a child’s murder while grieving her own son, and modelled the character on Kate Winslet‘s work in Mare of Easttown. The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2023 and opened in Indian cinemas in September 2024 to good notices and poor returns.

Daayra, released on 18 September 2026, is the most serious version of that experiment so far. Co-written and directed by Meghna Gulzar, it follows the aftermath of a police encounter that kills the suspects in the rape and murder of a young woman and turns an officer into a national hero. Kareena plays DCP Ajooni Kohli, the investigator who keeps asking whether the killings were justice at all, opposite Prithviraj Sukumaran as DCP Raman Kumar. Gulzar has said the story draws on several real cases rather than one. The actress has admitted that restraining her naturally animated expressions was the hardest part of the job. The Week and WION praised the pairing, and the film holds a 74 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but it opened at 0.94 crore rupees, the lowest first day of her career, and had taken about 8.36 crore rupees worldwide in its first days.

Saif, the boys and a night in January

She married the actor Saif Ali Khan in a registry ceremony in Bandra on 16 October 2012, after years of public speculation about the relationship, and said at the time that she would keep practising Hinduism while adding his surname to hers. The couple have two sons, Taimur, born in 2016, and Jehangir, born in 2021. Their home life became national news for the worst reason on 16 January 2025, when an intruder climbed into the family’s Bandra apartment through a bathroom window and stabbed Saif six times during a struggle near the younger boy’s room. Surgeons at Lilavati Hospital removed a fragment of the blade lodged near his spine, and police arrested a suspect in Thane a few days later. She later described 2025 as a difficult year for the family.

Away from film she has built a parallel public career. She wrote Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight with the nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar, The Style Diary of a Bollywood Diva with Rochelle Pinto and Kareena Kapoor Khan’s Pregnancy Bible with Aditi Shah Bhimjyani. Since 2018 she has hosted the talk show What Women Want on Ishq FM, now in its sixth season. She has worked with UNICEF on girls’ education since 2014 and was named its national Goodwill Ambassador for India in May 2024. That same year PVR INOX marked her twenty-five years in cinema with a festival of her films, the first film festival dedicated to an Indian actress. In November 2025 she sat at the family table for Dining with the Kapoors, the Netflix special directed by Smriti Mundhra for Raj Kapoor’s centenary.

What the next choice will say

No new film has been officially confirmed since Daayra, and that pause makes the next announcement unusually telling. A return to the ensemble comedies that keep paying would be the safe reading of a soft opening. Another restrained procedural would say that the actor who once refused to rehearse has decided that quiet is worth learning, whatever the first-day numbers say.