Mani Ratnam

Gopalaratnam Subramaniam (born 2 June 1956), known professionally as Mani Ratnam, is an Indian film director, film producer and screenwriter who predominantly works in Tamil cinema and a few Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films. He is known as one of the most prominent and greatest directors in the history of Indian cinema.

He has won seven National Film Awards, four Filmfare Awards, seven Filmfare Awards South, and numerous awards at various film festivals across the world. In 2002, the Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri, acknowledging his contributions to film.

Despite being born into a film family, Mani Ratnam did not develop any interest in films when he was young. Upon completion of his post graduation in management, he started his career as a consultant. He entered the film industry through the 1983 Kannada film, Pallavi Anu Pallavi. The failure of his subsequent films would mean that he would be left with fewer offers. After working in Telugu and Malayalam Cinema, he made his major breakthrough with Mouna Ragam (1986), established him as a leading filmmaker in Tamil cinema which won him his first Filmfare Best Director Award. He was the director of the critically acclaimed Nayakan (1987) and Anjali (1990), both of which qualified as India's official entry for The Academy Awards. He found success with the crime drama Thalapathi, romantic terrorism drama Roja (1992), Bombay (1995), Dil Se.. (1998), and his romantic trilogy of Mouna Ragam (1986), Alai Payuthey (2000), O Kadhal Kanmani (2015).

Each of his films contain its own unique style, with beautifully photographed songs and unique back-lighting. Exploring success in romantic, terrorism war and drama films. His epic historical dramas, Ponniyin Selvan: I (2022) and Ponniyin Selvan: II (2023), based on the Indian epic written by Kalki Krishnamurthy, were critical and commercial blockbusters with the former becoming the 35th highest-grossing film in India and 5th highest-grossing Tamil film.

Mani Ratnam was born on 2 June 1956 in a Tamil Iyer family in Madurai, Tamil Nadu as the second child of a family that was closely associated with film production. His father, S. Gopalaratnam, was a film distributor who worked for Venus Pictures, while his uncle, "Venus" Krishnamurthy, was a film producer. His elder brother G. Venkateswaran (died 2003) would go on to produce some of his films. His younger brother G. Srinivasan (died 2007), like G. Venkateswaran, would also co-produce some of his films. Mani Ratnam grew up in Madras (now Chennai), along with his siblings and cousins. Despite being a film family, the children were not allowed to watch films as the elders considered them taboo. "As a youngster, films seemed like a waste of time", he claimed in a 1994 interview; however, he started watching films more actively when he was studying at the Besant Theosophical School. During this time, he developed an admiration for actors like Sivaji Ganesan and Nagesh; watching all their films. When he discovered the legendary director K. Balachander, he became his fan. Upon completing his schooling, he graduated with a degree in commerce from the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda College, affiliated to the Madras University. Later, he did his Master of Business Administration (MBA) in finance from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai. After finishing his post-graduation in 1977, he was employed in a firm in Madras as a management consultant, and continued to work there for sometime.

Ratnam married actress Suhasini on 26 August 1988. The couple have a son. The family resides in Alwarpet, Chennai, where he runs his production company, Madras Talkies.

In 1995, Mani Ratnam was wounded and hospitalised after homemade bombs were thrown at his home by attackers, suspected by police as Islamic extremists, in the wake of opposition to his film Bombay which portrayed the romance of a Hindu man with a Muslim woman.

An FIR was filed on Mani Ratnam and 49 others in 2019 when they wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi listing statistics and expressing concern over the rise of communal violence against minorities including Muslims, Christians, and Dalits since Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took power in 2014.