Jackie Shroff

Biography

Jaikishan Kakubhai Shroff (born 1 February 1957), popularly known as Jackie Shroff, is an Indian actor and former model.

He has been in the Bollywood industry for over four decades, and as of 2020, has appeared in over 220 films in 13 languages namely Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Konkani, Odia, Gujarati and English. He has won four Filmfare Awards among other accolades.

He became an overnight star with Subhash Ghai's Hero (1983) film and eventually established himself as one of the leading men of Indian cinema from the 1980s to 1990s.

Shroff was born Jaikishan Kakubhai Shroff in Bombay (present Mumbai), India. His father, Kakubhai Haribhai Shroff, was Gujarati, while his mother was a Turkmen who fled from Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic under the Russian Soviet Union) during a coup.

His maternal grandmother escaped to Ladakh along with her seven daughters when there was a coup in Kazakhstan. They migrated to Delhi, and finally to Mumbai. His father came from a Gujarati family of merchants and traders.

However, they lost all of their money in the stock market and his father had to leave home at the age of 17. His father met his mother when both were teenagers and got married.

As a youngster, he modeled in a few advertisements including Savage perfumes. It was one of his classmates in school who gave Shroff his name "Jackie" and then filmmaker Subhash Ghai stuck to this name when he launched him in the film Hero. Shroff regularly revisits his childhood home in Teen Batti.

Shroff married his longtime girlfriend Ayesha Dutt, a model who later became a film producer, on her birthday, 5 June 1987. The couple runs a media company Jackie Shroff Entertainment Limited.

They jointly owned 10% shares in Sony TV from its launch until 2012, when they sold their stake and ended their 15-year-long association with Sony TV. They have two children: a daughter Krishna Shroff, and a son, Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff.