Cry For Her No More, it’s Kangna Act II

Few actors have been typecast as brutally as young Kangna Ranaut. Usually cuckoo to begin with, her characters (alcoholic, obsessive, heart-broken, abused) tend to hurtle over a mental cliff.

Few actors have been typecast as brutally as young Kangna Ranaut. Usually cuckoo to begin with, her characters (alcoholic, obsessive, heart-broken, abused) tend to hurtle over a mental cliff. This usually ends in death or other sorts of self-destruction. So when Milan Luthria, who directed Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, says she’s pretty undervalued, you might write this off as pre-release fluff. Except that he isn’t alone in saying this. Another filmmaker who recently completed filming with Ranaut called her the finest actor of her generation. Why, we wondered. The girl just gets it, he replied. She wants to know everything about her character, and then she goes off to do her own homework. So off she went, and when she returned, he noticed she had it. The way she walked—like she had a gun holstered—the way she cocked a gun, everything. She got it. This, in his experience, was pretty unusual for a Bollywood actor. Which makes you wonder: is this finally her time to shine?