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Shekhar Kapur, born 6 December 1945 in British India (in an area which became part of Pakistan) is a renowned film director and producer from India.

Personal life

His basic schooling was done at the Modern School, New Delhi. His works include Elizabeth (1998),a historically inaccurate account of the early reign of Queen Elizabeth I; it was nominated for 8 Oscars. In 2000, he was awarded the Padma Shri.

Shekhar Kapur is reported to be a close family relation of the Indian veteran star Dev Anand. Kapur is also a chartered accountant. He was married to singer and actress Suchitra Krishnamurthy and they divorced in Feb 2007.

In June 2005, Kapur and his friend, author Deepak Chopra launched a discussion blog [1] with a select group of their friends and family. The purpose of the blog is to promote original discussion by voices from South Asia, and especially India. Kapur posts regularly on the blog, often writing short personal poems. Shortly after, Kapur also started his own personal blog on his official website.

In 2006 Kapur formed Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation an entertainment company focussed on creating new stories and characters for a global audience. The Company was founded with Sir Richard Branson and his Virgin Group, author Deepak Chopra and entrepreneurs Sharad Devarajan, Suresh Seetharaman and Gotham Chopra.

Career

Shekhar Kapur started his career in Bollywood directing the Hindi film Masoom (1983). He then directed the 1987 Hindi science-fiction film Mr India.Both films were hugely successful and critically acclaimed. He has since directed films mostly in English.

Kapur has appeared in his own film Bandit Queen as a truck driver, and has also appeared in several Hindi TV serials and films, but his career never took off as an actor. Some scenes of the movie Joshilay (1989) which starred Sunny Deol, Anil Kapoor, Sridevi and Meenakshi Sheshadari were directed by Kapur and he also directed the incomplete 1992 Hindi film Time Machine.

He was accused of being Anti-British by British tabloids, for the way he portrayed the British Army and the Empire in the movie The Four Feathers. This was heightened by the fact that during an interview for the DVD release of the Four Feathers he spoke favorably of the fanatical religious leader depicted in the film (the Mahdi).

Kapur was the executive producer of the film The Guru. He also established an Indian talkies film company with Ram Gopal Verma and Mani Ratnam. This company has thus far produced only one film, Dil Se (1998) starring Shah Rukh Khan.

Kapur was also executive producer of the Bollywood-themed Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Bombay Dreams, which has been running in the West End, London since 2002, and on Broadway in New York City since 2004.

In an unusual role, Kapur played the voice of Mahatma Gandhi in the Charkha Audiobooks title of "The Story of My Experiments with Truth -autobiography of M.K. Gandhi", alongside Nandita Das as narrator.

His future projects include Long Walk to Freedom, Water, The Last Full Measure, and Golden Age, a sequel to Elizabeth. According to screenwriter John Rogers, the success of Elizabeth led to Kapur being tapped to work on an adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, though the project was eventually shelved. [2] Kapur also tentatively planned to helm a motion picture account of the life of the Buddha, entitled Buddha, but the plans were later dropped for unstated reasons.

Filmography

• Masoom (1983)
• Mr. India (1987)
• Time Machine (Incomplete)
• Bandit Queen (1994)
• Elizabeth (1998)
• The Four Feathers (2002)
• Elizabeth: The Golden Age (future release)
• The Last Full Measure (future release)
• Long Walk to Freedom (future release)
• Buddha (on hold)
• Foundation (unproduced)

External links

• Shekhar Kapur at the Internet Movie Database
• Shekhar Kapur's official website
• Shekhar Kapur's official blog
• Shekhar Kapur at IntentBlog