Burripalem is a modest farming village in the Guntur district of coastal Andhra Pradesh, the sort of place where the rhythm of the year is set by paddy and tobacco rather than by anything happening in a city. On 31 May 1943 a boy named Ghattamaneni Siva Rama Krishna Murthy was born there, into a family with no connection whatsoever to the film industry. Six decades later, the Telugu-speaking world would know him by a single word, Krishna, and would credit him with dragging their cinema, sometimes reluctantly, into the modern age.

A Village Boy Who Walked Into the Movies

Krishna's schooling was ordinary and provincial. He completed his early education in small-town Andhra and took a science degree at C. R. Reddy College in Eluru. It was there, during a college function, that he acted for the first time and was told by those watching that he ought to take it seriously. In the early 1960s that was an audacious idea for a graduate from a Guntur village with no industry contacts and no money behind him. He went to Madras anyway, where the Telugu film industry was then headquartered, and spent an unglamorous stretch doing small parts and waiting.

His break came in 1965 with Thene Manasulu, in which he played the lead. The film mattered for a reason beyond his own career: it was made with an entirely new cast at a moment when Telugu cinema was dominated by a small circle of established stars. Krishna arrived without lineage, without a mentor, and without the classical stage training that most leading men of the period carried. What he had instead was an unfussy, contemporary screen presence that a younger and increasingly urban audience recognised as their own.

The Man Who Kept Trying Things First

The most striking thing about Krishna's career is how much of it was spent taking commercial risks that other stars would not touch. In 1966 he made Gudachari 116, which introduced the espionage thriller to Telugu cinema and set off a long run of spy pictures. In 1971 he made Mosagallaku Mosagadu, a full-blooded western with horses, hats, holsters and a Telugu plot, at a time when nobody in India believed the genre could be transplanted. It worked, and it travelled.

His most consequential gamble came in 1974 with Alluri Seetarama Raju, a large-scale biographical film about the tribal revolutionary of the Rampa rebellion. It was the first Telugu film shot in CinemaScope, and it demanded a budget and a technical ambition that had no precedent in the language. It succeeded both critically and commercially, and it won him the state Nandi Award for Best Actor. He returned to that appetite for scale in 1986 with Simhasanam, the first Telugu film made in 70mm. He was also among the earliest in the industry to push for colour stock and for the wide-screen formats that would become standard.

Across roughly six decades he appeared in more than 350 films and directed seventeen of them. He worked repeatedly with a handful of collaborators, including some four dozen films with the actor and director Vijaya Nirmala, and long partnerships with Jaya Prada and Sridevi. The sheer volume tells its own story about how hard he worked, but the firsts are what earned him the enduring nickname of Superstar in Telugu.

Padmalaya and Building an Industry at Home

Krishna understood early that an actor who only acts is dependent on other people's courage. In 1970 he and his brothers set up a production house, Padmalaya, whose first release was Agni Pariksha. It gave him the freedom to finance the experiments the established studios refused. It also gave him a platform to argue a larger case: that the Telugu film industry should not be run out of Madras at all, but from Hyderabad, in its own state.

He backed that argument with money and labour. In 1982 the Andhra Pradesh government allotted him land in Hyderabad to help build up film infrastructure there, and in November 1984 Padmalaya Studios opened its doors. He was one of the industry figures whose relocation helped shift the centre of gravity of Telugu cinema to Hyderabad, where it has remained ever since.

Politics, Family and Last Years

Like several of his contemporaries in the south, Krishna moved into electoral politics. He contested for the Indian National Congress and was elected to the Lok Sabha from Eluru, serving from 1989 to 1991. He remained associated with the Congress for much of his life, at a time when the party's fortunes in Andhra Pradesh were being sharply challenged by a rival led by another film star.

His family became a dynasty in its own right. From his first marriage to Indira Devi he had five children, including the producer Ramesh Babu and the actor Mahesh Babu, one of the biggest stars of the following generation, as well as Padmavathi, Manjula and Priyadarshini. He later married Vijaya Nirmala, herself a pioneering woman director in Indian cinema. His last years were marked by family bereavements, including the deaths of two of his children.

Recognition arrived steadily. He received the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award for southern cinema in 1997, the NTR National Award in 2003, and the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 2009. He died in Hyderabad on 15 November 2022, aged seventy-nine, following a cardiac arrest. Tributes came from across the political and cinematic spectrum, but the most repeated line was the simplest one: that a boy from Burripalem had changed what Telugu films were allowed to attempt.