Ramapuram, a village in the Gudivada region of Krishna district in coastal Andhra, was where Akkineni Nageswara Rao was born on 20 September 1923, the youngest child of a poor farming family. His formal education ended in primary school. He went on to a film career lasting some seventy-five years and more than two hundred and fifty films, received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and the Padma Vibhushan, and single-handedly changed the geography of the Telugu film industry. He is known universally by his initials, ANR.

From village stage to Vijayawada station

The family had little. ANR began performing at around the age of ten with travelling drama companies, and in the theatre convention of the time — where women rarely appeared on stage — he made his early reputation playing female roles. He performed in mythological and devotional dramas including Harishchandra, Kanakatara and Vipranarayana, moving from village to village with the troupe.

His entry into cinema came through a chance encounter: the producer Ghantasala Balaramayya noticed him at Vijayawada railway station and cast him. He made his film debut in Dharmapatni in 1941, aged around eighteen, and took his first lead role in Sri Seeta Rama Jananam in 1944.

The great run

ANR's career established him as one of the two towering figures of Telugu cinema of his generation, alongside N. T. Rama Rao. Where NTR came to be identified with gods, kings and epic heroes, ANR became the industry's romantic and emotional lead — the actor of interiority, longing and restraint.

Balaraju (1948) and Keelu Gurram (1949) made him a star.
Devadasu (1953) is his defining film. His portrayal of the doomed, self-destructive lover became the reference version of the character in Indian cinema, and its songs remain among the most familiar in the Telugu repertoire.
Missamma (1955), a comedy that showed a completely different register.
Mayabazar (1957), where he played Abhimanyu in what is widely considered the finest Telugu film ever made.
Mahakavi Kalidasu (1960), Doctor Chakravarthy (1964) and Sudigundalu (1968), covering historical, professional and socially serious roles.
Prema Nagar (1971), an enormous success later remade in several languages.
Bhakta Tukaram (1973) and Premabhishekam (1981).

He worked in Tamil and Hindi as well as Telugu, and continued acting into his nineties. His final film, Manam (2014), released after his death, featured three generations of the Akkineni family on screen together.

Moving an industry

ANR's most consequential decision had nothing to do with acting. Through the 1950s and 1960s the Telugu film industry was based in Madras, hundreds of kilometres outside the Telugu-speaking states, with its studios, technicians and finance all located in another linguistic region.

ANR argued that this was untenable and moved himself and his family to Hyderabad in the 1970s. In 1976 he founded Annapurna Studios there. Other producers and technicians followed, and within a decade the centre of gravity of Telugu cinema had shifted decisively to Hyderabad. That relocation is the direct ancestor of the enormous production infrastructure the city now hosts, and ANR's role in initiating it is universally acknowledged within the industry.

Annapurna Studios remains a working facility, and the family later established a film and media college attached to it.

Honours

ANR received the full sequence of national recognitions:

Padma Shri, 1968
Padma Bhushan, 1988
Dadasaheb Phalke Award, 1990 — the highest honour in Indian cinema
Padma Vibhushan, 2011

He also received the Raghupathi Venkaiah Award and numerous state and industry honours, and the ANR National Award was instituted in his name to recognise achievement in Indian cinema.

Alongside the acting, ANR was for decades one of the industry's senior organisational figures, involved in its guilds and welfare bodies and consulted routinely on questions affecting technicians and workers. He was known within the business for punctuality, for a refusal to keep units waiting, and for a discipline about his own health and physical condition that was frequently cited as the reason he was still working leading roles in his eighties.

In October 2013 ANR did something almost unheard of for an Indian public figure of his generation: he called a press conference to announce publicly that he had been diagnosed with cancer, spoke about it calmly and without euphemism, and said he intended to keep working. He did keep working, completing scenes for Manam. He died in Hyderabad on 22 January 2014, aged ninety.

Legacy

ANR's career is close to a complete history of Telugu cinema. He entered the industry when it was silent film's immediate successor, working from the travelling drama companies of the Krishna delta, and left it as a globally exporting business headquartered in a city he helped bring it to. He acted opposite four generations of actresses and shared the screen with his own grandson.

For Ramapuram, a village in Krishna district with no particular claim on the wider world, the connection is direct: the boy who left it to act women's parts in a touring drama troupe, with a primary-school education and no money, became one of the two men who built an industry.