Kangana Ranaut Is Too Excited For Words After Bagging The National Award For The Best Actress In Manikarnika

Sharing her excitement at having been informed that she is the recipient of the prestigious National award for the Best Actress in the film Manikarnika also directed by her - Jyothi Venkatesh

The versatile actress par excellence Kangana Ranaut declared at the trailer launch of her Tamil and Hindi bilingual Thalaivi which is a biopic of the late political leader and the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu J. Jayalalitha.

That in the first place the film was the brainchild of her choreographer Brinda to make a film on the late versatile actress of Tamil Nadu because she had actually seen the spirit of J Jayalalitha in Kangana Ranaut and it was she who had recommended her name to Vijayendra who has written and directed the film Thalaivi with Kangana in the title role.

Talking about the release of her film Thalaivi this year, Kangana reiterated that the entire team of Thalaivi is determined to fight with the dreaded pandemic and defeat it by setting out to release the film as a tribute to the spirit of the late Chief Minister of Tamiul Nadu- J. Jayalalitha this year.’

It is a very important film in my filmography. I am happy I got the opportunity to play the role of a brave woman like Jayalalitha even though my mother tongue is not Tamil.

I am lucky I have always had opportunities to play the roles of strong women in my film be it Manikarnika or for that matter Panga.”

Kangana Ranaut asserted that she is playing the life of the dynamic Jaya Maa by interpreting her role by drawing it out from the late Chief Minister and said that she will always owe it to the late Jayalalitha who is revered as a demi Goddess all over Tamil Nadu for her yeoman services rendered to the common men.

Thanking director A.L.Vijay Sir for having considered her to play the role of the Tamil leader Jayalalitha, “in spite of the fact that I did not bear any kind of resemblance to her and not only was I poles apart from her but also had a very skinny frame as well as high cheek bones whereas Jayalalitha Maa was very curvaceous”, Kangana asserted that she is lucky that people have never questioned her choice to play the role of Manikarnika earlier or Thalaivi now even though she is not either a Maharashtrian or for that matter a Tamilian girl.

Kangana continued. “As part of my home work, I started looking exactly like Jayalalitha Maa.

I just played the medium and thanks to an unforeseen divine universal alignment, I started having an uncanny resemblance to Jayaa Maa.

It was actually very eerie when I was shooting for the film. Frankly it was a very rare experience for me to get into the skin of the character of a fearless leader like her and I could identify with the late actress cum leader 200 per cent.

I took up the challenge of putting on additional weight to play Jayalalitha in her later years as a politician as well as shed my weight in order to play the teenage Jayalalitha in her formative years when she made her debut with the Tamil film Vennira Aadai directed by Shridharji who had discovered her way back in the 60’s with effortless ease.``

The film Thalaivi stars besides Kangana Ranaut, who plays the role of Thalaivi Jayalalitha, also Aravind Swamy as MGR, Bhagyashree in the role of her mother Sandhya, Shamna Kasim as Jayalalitha’s trusted aide Sashikala, Jisshu Sengupta as Telugu film star Shoban Babu who was Jayalalitha’s close confidante, Prakash Raj who plays the role of her political foe and erstwhile Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu K. Karunanidhi, Samuthirakani as politician and MGR’s friend R.M. Veerappan and Madhoo as Janaki Amma, MGR’s wife and Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu for some time after his death.

Kangana Ranaut signs off by stating that though when the film went on the floors before the pandemic, there was a lot of political comedy that she had to face in her life way back in 2019 and the shooting of her film Thalaivi had to stop when the pandemic was in full swing in the year 2020, the film resumed shooting this year and has been successfully completed and thankfully has shaped out to be better than what the entire team had actually even expected, thanks to divine blessings from none other than Jayalalitha herself.

For those who are uninitiated, Thalaivi in Tamil means A female leader. Jayalalitha who I had the good fortune of meeting at Mumbai’s Century Bazaar at Worli where I was staying in the 60’s when I was studying in school.

Jayalalitha had come for her shopping to Century Bazaar during her visit to Mumbai to act opposite Dharmendra in the Hindi film Izzat, her one and only single outing in Mumbai film industry till date.

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