Priyanka Chopra

• 1. Introduction

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  Priyanka Chopra Jonas was crowned Miss World at the Millennium Dome in London on the 30th of November 2000. In 2001, the bridge of her nose collapsed during surgery to remove a polyp. She fell into depression over an appearance she described as "completely different." Corrective surgeries eventually left her satisfied with the result.

  That fragile start is hard to square with the career that followed. How does a pageant winner survive a run of failed films that leaves critics writing her off? What drew a girl raised on army postings across India toward the United States, and then back again? And why does an actress who was first cast for glamour keep choosing parts that test her?

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• 2. Childhood and Crown

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  Priyanka Chopra was born on the 18th of July 1982 in Jamshedpur, in what was then Bihar and is now Jharkhand. Her parents, Ashok and Madhu Chopra, were both physicians in the Indian Army. Her brother Siddharth, seven years younger, arrived while the family was posted in Ladakh.

  The army sent the family to Delhi, Chandigarh, Ambala, Ladakh, Lucknow, Bareilly and Pune. Chopra attended La Martiniere Girls' School in Lucknow and St. Maria Goretti College in Bareilly. She told Daily News and Analysis that she did not mind changing schools, and that it showed her India's many cultures. Her fondest memories come from a year in Leh. "We were all army kids there," she recalled, adding "We used to race up to the top of the stupa." She now calls Bareilly her home town.

  At 13, Chopra moved to the United States to study, living with an aunt whose family also moved often. After a stop in Queens, New York, she attended schools in Newton, Massachusetts, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In Massachusetts she took part in theatre productions and studied Western classical music and choral singing. A classmate bullied her for being Indian. Years later she described herself this way: "I was a gawky kid, had low self-esteem, came from a modest middle-class background, had white marks on my legs. But I was damn hard working. Today, my legs sell 12 brands." After three years she returned to India and finished high school at the Army Public School in Bareilly.

  Back home, Chopra won the local May Queen pageant, and admirers began to pursue her. Her family fitted the house with bars for her protection. Her mother then entered her in the Femina Miss India contest of 2000, where she finished second and took the Femina Miss India World title. Chopra became the fifth Indian to win Miss World, and the fourth to do so within seven years. She had enrolled in college but left after the win, because film offers had started to arrive.

  Her mother, a well-established gynaecologist in Bareilly, gave up her own practice to support the new film career.

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• 3. Uneven Debut

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  Abbas-Mustan's thriller Humraaz in 2002 was meant to be Chopra's first film, but the casting fell through. She said the production clashed with her schedule. The producers said they recast because she had taken on other commitments.

  Her real screen debut was the Tamil film Thamizhan in 2002, where she played the love interest of Vijay. The Hindu praised the film's wit and dialogue but felt her part gave her little to do as an actress. In 2003 came her first Bollywood film, Anil Sharma's The Hero: Love Story of a Spy, set against the Indian Army in Kashmir. She was the second female lead, opposite Sunny Deol and Preity Zinta. Chopra later said she was "shaking" when she first met Deol. There was talk that she was not good enough and might be removed, but Deol insisted she get a chance. The film became one of that year's highest-grossing Bollywood releases. Variety wrote that "mega-looker Chopra makes a solid screen debut."

  Later in 2003, Chopra appeared in Raj Kanwar's hit Andaaz, playing a vivacious young woman who falls for Akshay Kumar's character. She shared the lead with the debutante Lara Dutta. Together they won the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut, and Chopra also earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

  Then came a stumble. Her first three releases of 2004, Plan, Kismat and Asambhav, did poorly. The critic Joginder Tuteja said she was cast in that period as a "glamour quotient" in forgettable roles. Mujhse Shaadi Karogi, with Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar, reversed the run and became the third-highest-grossing film of the year in India.

  The turning point was Abbas-Mustan's thriller Aitraaz, late in 2004. Chopra played Soniya Roy, an ambitious woman who accuses her employee of sexual harassment. It was her first antagonist, and she calls it the "biggest learning experience of her career." A BBC reviewer wrote that she chewed up every scene with magnetic screen presence. She won the Filmfare Award for Best Performance in a Negative Role, the second and final actress to do so after Kajol, because the category was dropped in 2008.

  The year 2005 would bring her six films.

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• 4. Slump and Fashion

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  Two action thrillers, Blackmail and Karam, opened Chopra's 2005 and failed both critically and commercially. During the filming of Waqt: The Race Against Time, a song shoot called "Do Me A Favour Let's Play Holi" ended with her electrocuted and spending a day in hospital. For another song in the same film, "Subah Hogi", she went back to Leh, her childhood haunt. Waqt was a commercial success, and so was the comedy Bluffmaster! later that year.

  In 2006, Rakesh Roshan's superhero film Krrish cast her as a young television journalist. It became the second-highest-grossing film of the year in India. Farhan Akhtar's Don followed, with Shah Rukh Khan. Chopra played Roma, trained in martial arts and performed her own stunts. Raja Sen of Rediff.com called her the film's big surprise and praised her as an actress willing to push herself.

  Then the hits stopped. Salaam-e-Ishq and Big Brother, both from 2007, flopped at the domestic box office. In 2008, Love Story 2050 gave her a double role, so she dyed her hair red for the girl from the future and black for the girl from the past. Drona, a fantasy superhero film criticised for its heavy use of special effects, was her sixth film in a row to fail with both critics and audiences. Critics generally believed her career was over.

  Madhur Bhandarkar's Fashion changed that. Chopra first thought the part of the ambitious supermodel Meghna Mathur was beyond her. After six months of consideration, she accepted, inspired by Bhandarkar's confidence in her. She had to gain 6 kg and then lose it gradually as the character's story progressed. The performance won the National Film Award for Best Actress, plus the Filmfare, IIFA, Screen and Producers Guild awards for Best Actress. The film made money despite having no male lead. In 2012 she said: "Today you have so many other films which have done well with female leads."

  Her last film of 2008 was Dostana, set in Miami, in which she played the fashion-magazine editor Neha Melwani. For Fashion and Dostana together, she shared the Stardust Award for Actor of the Year - Female.

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• 5. Unusual Roles

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  In Vishal Bhardwaj's Kaminey in 2009, Chopra played Sweety, a feisty Marathi woman, and spoke fluent Marathi in the part. Raja Sen of Rediff.com named it the best performance by an actress that year. Her second consecutive Producers Guild Film Award for Best Actress followed.

  She played twelve different women, one for each zodiac sign, in Ashutosh Gowariker's What's Your Raashee?, and was considered for a Guinness World Records entry as the first film actress to portray twelve characters in one film. The workload of films, endorsement travel and live shows caught up with her. She fainted during filming and was admitted to hospital.

  In 2011, Chopra played Susanna Anna-Marie Johannes in 7 Khoon Maaf, based on Ruskin Bond's short story Susanna's Seven Husbands. Susanna is an Anglo-Indian woman who murders her husbands in a search for love. The performance earned her the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress. Later that year she returned as Roma in Don 2. The Express Tribune wrote that she may be the first proper female action hero in Bollywood.

  During Agneepath in 2012, her lehenga caught fire while she filmed an elaborate Ganpati festival song. The accident was one of several on that production. Agneepath broke Bollywood's opening-day earnings record. Anurag Basu's Barfi! followed, in which she played Jhilmil Chatterjee, an autistic woman who falls in love with a deaf, mute man played by Ranbir Kapoor. The director Rituparno Ghosh called accepting the role "very, very brave." To prepare, Chopra visited several mental institutions and spent time with autistic people. Filmfare called her performance the best representation of autism on Indian screens. Barfi! was chosen as India's entry for the 85th Academy Awards.

  In 2013, Disneytoon Studios cast her as the voice of Ishaani, an Indian champion racer, in Planes. "The closest I could come to being a Disney princess, I think, was Ishaani," she said. Krrish 3 that year became her biggest commercial success to that point, though critics felt she had little to do.

  For Mary Kom in 2014, she spent time with the boxer herself and trained in boxing for four months. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Then in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Bajirao Mastani, Chopra played Kashibai, the first wife of the Maratha general Peshwa Bajirao I. Reviewers said she practically stole the film, and she won the Filmfare, IIFA and Screen awards for Best Supporting Actress.

  Around the same time, she signed a talent holding deal with ABC Studios.

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• 6. The American Break

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  Quantico premiered on ABC in 2015, with Chopra as the FBI recruit Alex Parrish. She became the first South Asian to headline an American network drama series. She also became the first South Asian actress to win a People's Choice Award, for Favourite Actress In A New TV Series, and won a second the following year. The show was cancelled after three seasons in 2018. Chopra explained her move west bluntly: "I had people not casting me, I had beef with people, I am not good at playing that game so I kind of was tired of the politics and I said I needed a break."

  Her Hollywood film debut was the villain Victoria Leeds in Baywatch in 2017, opposite Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron. Reviews of the film were poor, though IGN called her the highlight. Overseas it grossed approximately $178 million. A Kid Like Jake reached the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. In early 2019 she left Bharat, opposite Salman Khan, days before filming her scenes. A producer attributed this to her engagement to Nick Jonas.

  In 2019 she played a yoga ambassador in Isn't It Romantic, which grossed approximately $49 million in North America. She also produced and starred in The Sky Is Pink, playing the mother of the teenager Aisha Chaudhary, who had a terminal illness. Kate Erbland of IndieWire called her "extraordinary."

  In 2020 she signed a two-year multimillion-dollar first-look deal with Amazon Prime Video, to back first-time BIPOC and female filmmakers. That year she played Ms. Granada in Netflix's We Can Be Heroes. In 2021 she was Pinky Shah in The White Tiger, which she also executive produced, and an adult Sati in The Matrix Resurrections. That film grossed US$160 million against a US$190 million budget.

  Citadel, in 2023, cast her as the spy Nadia Sinh alongside Richard Madden. Its six-episode first season ran on a US$300 million budget. For the first time in her 22-year career, she received equal pay with her male co-star. She did many of her own stunts and has a permanent scar on her eyebrow from an injury. Heads of State arrived on Prime Video in July 2025, with John Cena and Idris Elba. The Bluff, from the Russo brothers, followed in February 2026. In it she plays a former pirate in the late 19th-century Cayman Islands.

  Her next Indian film, Varanasi with Mahesh Babu, was directed by S. S. Rajamouli with a budget of US$150 million. It is the most expensive Indian film made and is slated for 2027.

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• 7. Beyond the Screen

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  Vijay, her director and co-star on Thamizhan, noticed her singing on the set. At his urging she recorded "Ullathai Killathe," her first song. Her father had developed her interest in singing. In August 2011, Universal Music Group signed her to a worldwide recording agreement, and in July 2012 Creative Artists Agency made her the first Bollywood star on its roster.

  Her first single, "In My City," with the rapper will.i.am, debuted in the US on the 13th of September 2012 in a TV spot for NFL Thursday Night Football. In India it sold more than 130,000 copies in its first week and was certified triple platinum. In the United States it managed 5,000 digital downloads in its first week and got no radio play. "Exotic," with Pitbull, followed in July 2013 and peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart. Her third single was a cover of Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me." She later said her music career "was not living up to my standards" and that continuing would have been "futile."

  In 2015 she founded Purple Pebble Pictures to make small-budget films and promote new talent, especially in regional Indian cinema. Its first Marathi film, Ventilator in 2016, won three awards at the 64th National Film Awards. Paani in 2019 won the National Film Award for Best Film on Environment Conservation/Preservation at the 66th ceremony.

  In 2018 she began investing in technology, backing the coding school Holberton School and Bumble, which launched in India that October with her help. Her haircare line, Anamoly Haircare, reached Target stores in the United States on the 1st of February 2021. In March 2021 she opened Sona, an Indian restaurant in Manhattan.

  In 2009 she began a column for the Hindustan Times and wrote 50 pieces in total. Her 2012 Times of India column discussed the murder of 25-year-old Pallavi Purkayastha, whom she had met while working on Don. Her memoir Unfinished, from Penguin Random House, came out on the 9th of February 2021 and reached The New York Times Best Seller list. The Associated Press called it a "deeply open and honest account."

  In a New York Times op-ed titled "What Jane Austen Knew," she wrote that her wish to help others began at 9, when she joined her parents as they volunteered to bring modern health care to the rural poor.

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• 8. Causes and Image

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  Chopra has worked with UNICEF since 2006, and she was named national Goodwill Ambassador for Child Rights on the 10th of August 2010. She became the global ambassador in December 2016. In 2019 UNICEF gave her the Danny Kaye Humanitarian Award. Her own foundation for health and education pays medical and school costs for seventy children, fifty of them girls, and she gives ten percent of her earnings to run it.

  Her causes have been varied. In 2006 a "day with Chopra" was auctioned on eBay to benefit the girls' education group Nanhi Kali. In 2013 she opened a cancer ward at Nanavati hospital named after her late father. Narendra Modi chose her as one of his nine "Navratna" nominees for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014, and she worked a day as a sanitation worker in Mumbai. In December 2019, with UNICEF and Crocs, she helped donate 50,000 pairs of shoes to schoolchildren in Belize.

  In 2019, an activist criticised a tweet in which she hailed India's military during tensions with Pakistan. Pakistan asked for her removal from her UN role, but the UN supported her right to speak for herself. In April 2021, as COVID-19 overwhelmed India, she and Nick Jonas opened a fundraiser with GiveIndia. It passed $1 million by the 13th of May 2021 and set a new target of $3 million.

  In the media she goes by "PeeCee," "PC" and "Piggy Chops." In 2009 she topped the TAM AdEx list of brand ambassadors, the first woman in India to do so. In 2016 she became the first Indian woman to represent Pantene globally. Forbes reported in 2017 that she earned at least $1 million per endorsement deal. In 2020, social media users criticised her for posting support for Black Lives Matter after earlier advertising skin-lightening products. She has said she regrets promoting them.

  Her father died in 2013. A year earlier she had a tattoo reading "Daddy's lil girl" in his handwriting. She started dating Nick Jonas in May 2018, and he proposed on the 19th of July 2018 in Crete. They married in December 2018 at Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur, in Hindu and Christian ceremonies. Their daughter, Malti Marie Chopra Jonas, was born in January 2022 through surrogacy.

  In a book called Roving Families, Shifting Homes, taught at Springdales School, one chapter tells her story from her Miss World win onward.

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