Deepika Padukone, born on 5th January, 1986 is a leading Bollywood actress and model. She has acted in many Hindi, Tamil and Kannada movies. She is the daughter of Prakash Padukone (former badminton player and winner of the All England Championship in the year 1980). Her mother was working for a travel agency. Deepika herself is a state badminton player but she chose modeling and acting as a career instead of becoming a sportsperson. She is also having a younger sister Anisha Padukone who is a national golfer.
Her first Bollywood movie ‘Om Shanti Om’ was released in the year 2007 and she won the Filmfare best female debut. She started her acting career in 2006 in a Kannada movie. Until now she has acted in about 13 movies. She has got 4 films lined up for release in the year 2012 and early 2013. These are ‘Cocktail’, ‘Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani’, ‘Race 2’ and a Tamil movie ‘Kochadaiyaan’.
She was born in Copenhagen Denmark and completed her high school at Sophia High School in Bangalore and pre university studies were completed at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. She played badminton at the state level while she was in school and college. By the time she got enrolled with Indira Gandhi National Open University for a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology, she got offers from Bollywood.
She has also endorsed many television commercials such as Liril, Close-up toothpaste, Dabur Lal Powder, Limca, Fiama soap etc. She is also the ambassador for Kingfisher Airlines and also for Tissot SA watches and Levis brand. She was known to be romantically linked with Bollywood Actor Ranbhir Kapoor and Siddharth Malaya (Son of the owner of Kingfisher Airlines). She also adopted a small village in Maharashtra, Ambegaon which faced a severe electricity crisis under the Greenathon Campaign led by NDTV. In the year 2009, she also began writing weekly columns for HT City which is a supplement paper of Hindustan Times. She also appeared in the cover page for ‘Vogue’ lifestyle magazine for the years 2010 and 2011. She also got an opportunity to walk the red carpet at Cannes Film Festival in the year 2010.
