Arundathi Nag

Actress

Biography

Arundathi Nag, née Rao, is prominent South Indian polyglot film actress and theatre personality. She has been involved with multilingual Theatre in India, for over 25 years, first in Mumbai where got involved with Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), and did various productions in Gujarati, Marathi, and Hindi theatre, besides getting involved in television, director Jyoti Vyas's Gujarati TV series, Haji Aavti Kaal Che. Later and after her marriage to Kannada actor-director Shankar Nag (1954-1990), her association with theatre continued in Bangalore, culminating in realizing the dream project of her late husband, the Ranga Shankara theatre, at J P Nagar, a suburb in Bangalore. She was awarded the 2008 Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in Theatre Acting by Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's National Academy of Music, Dance and Theatre . Arundathi is the founder and the Managing Trustee of the Sanket Trust, established in 1992, which has Girish Karnad as its chairman, and which runs the Ranga Shankara, a Bangalore theatre which after four years of construction was inaugurated on 28 October 2004. Now the annual Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival has become a regular feature on Bangalore's cultural calendar. Though she started doing theatre in school days in Mumbai, and by the time she was in her teens she was already doing Marathi, Gujrati and Hindi theatre in the city, where she met Shankar Nag also a theatre artist, soon they moved to Banglore, where Shankar became popular film actor, and later a director, most remembered for his TV adaptation of RK Narayan's Malgudi Days (1987). In 2006, she was awarded the 'Citizen Extraordinaire' Award by The Rotary Club of Bangalore. Arundathi's last major movie was the Kannada blockbuster Jogi, for which she also won the Karnataka Government's Best Supporting Actress award for the year 2005. Her most recent production has been Girish Karnad's Bikhre Bimb. Arundathi has also acted in other language films such as Minsara Kanavu (1997), dubbed into Hindi as Sapnay (1997), Dil Se (1998). She has acted in the Indian National Award winning Marathi film 22 June 1897.