Mogalthur, a village in the delta country of West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh, was the birthplace on 22 August 1955 of Konidela Siva Sankara Vara Prasad — the actor the Telugu-speaking world knows as Chiranjeevi, and calls Megastar. From a constable's household in that village he became the dominant figure in Telugu cinema for more than two decades, built one of India's largest privately run blood and eye banks, founded a political party, and served as a Union Minister. In 2024 he received the Padma Vibhushan.

A policeman's son

Chiranjeevi's father, Konidela Venkat Rao, was a police constable, and the family moved frequently as he was transferred from posting to posting. That itinerant childhood took the boy across coastal Andhra, and his schooling was correspondingly scattered. He completed his intermediate education at C. S. R. Sarma College in Ongole and took a commerce degree from Sri Y. N. College at Narsapuram.

He then made a decision no one in the family had any basis for supporting: in 1976 he enrolled at the Madras Film Institute to train as an actor, adopting the screen name Chiranjeevi. He had no film connections and no money behind him.

Building a career from nothing

His debut came in Pranam Khareedu in 1978, followed the same year by a role in Mana Voori Pandavulu that got him noticed. The early years were spent largely in villain and character parts, and it took several years of steady work before he broke through.

The turning point was Khaidi in 1983, a hard-edged action film that was a phenomenon at the box office and established him as a leading man. From that point until the early 2000s he was, by a wide margin, the biggest star in Telugu cinema.

His filmography of roughly a hundred and fifty films spans several distinct modes:

Swayamkrushi (1987), the story of a cobbler's self-made rise, widely regarded as among his finest performances.
Rudraveena (1988), about a classical musician's son who turns to social work, which won a national award for its contribution to national integration.
Aapadbandhavudu (1992), a demanding dramatic role.
Gharana Mogudu (1992), a commercial landmark and among the first Telugu films to cross the ten-crore mark.
Indra (2002) and Tagore (2003), the mass-appeal films of his later peak.
Khaidi No. 150 (2017), his return to the screen after a decade in politics, and Waltair Veerayya (2023).

He is credited above all with transforming the place of dance in Telugu cinema. Before Chiranjeevi, the Telugu hero was primarily a dramatic and dialogue-driven figure; he made high-energy choreography central to the form, and every subsequent generation of Telugu stars has worked within the template he set.

The Charitable Trust

In 1998 Chiranjeevi established the Chiranjeevi Charitable Trust, which runs a blood bank and an eye bank in Hyderabad. The scale of its operation is unusual for a foundation attached to a film personality: it has collected and supplied blood units in the hundreds of thousands, with a large majority provided free to patients unable to pay, and has facilitated thousands of corneal transplants restoring sight to recipients across the region.

He has campaigned publicly and persistently on eye donation and voluntary blood donation, and the trust's work is generally regarded as the most substantial philanthropic effort by any Indian film figure of his era.

Politics

In August 2008 Chiranjeevi founded the Praja Rajyam Party, contesting the 2009 Andhra Pradesh elections on a platform of social justice. The party won eighteen assembly seats and around sixteen per cent of the vote — a substantial result for a first outing, but far short of the wave many had expected. In 2011 he merged the party with the Indian National Congress.

He was elected to the Rajya Sabha, serving from 2012 to 2018, and was appointed Union Minister of State with independent charge for Tourism, holding that office from October 2012 to May 2014.

Honours

Chiranjeevi's recognitions include:

Padma Bhushan, 2006
Padma Vibhushan, 2024
Raghupathi Venkaiah Award, 2016, the highest honour of Telugu cinema
Nine Filmfare Awards South, including a lifetime achievement award
Multiple Nandi Awards from the Andhra Pradesh government
A Guinness World Records recognition in 2024 for the volume of dance work across his career

Chiranjeevi remains professionally active, and the family he heads — including his brother Pawan Kalyan and a younger generation of actors — is among the most prominent in Indian cinema. He has maintained a visible connection to West Godavari and to Mogalthur, which is now marked as his birthplace and receives visitors on that account.

His significance is not only that a constable's son from a delta village became the biggest star of a major Indian film industry. It is that he did so with no inherited position in an industry substantially organised around family, and then used the standing it gave him for public health work at genuine scale.