A boy from Chandiroor

Chandiroor is a modest settlement in the Cherthala belt of Alappuzha district, a stretch of coastal Kerala defined by coconut groves, narrow canals and the smell of retting coir. On 7 September 1951, when the region still lay within the short-lived state of Travancore-Cochin, a son was born there to Ismail, a man of the trading class, and his wife Fatima. The child was named Muhammad Kutty. He was the eldest of six, and much of his boyhood was spent a little inland at Chempu, in neighbouring Kottayam district, where the family later made its home. Half a century afterwards the whole subcontinent would recognise him by a single word, Mammootty, but Chandiroor remains the fixed point from which one of the longest and most decorated careers in Indian cinema unfolds.

He was schooled locally, then took his pre-degree at Sacred Heart College in Thevara and a bachelor's degree at Maharaja's College, Ernakulam, an institution that has sent generations of Kerala's writers and public figures into the world. From there he read law at the Government Law College in Ernakulam. For roughly two years he actually practised, appearing in the district courts of Kerala and taking mostly criminal briefs. It was a respectable, secure profession, and he walked away from it. The decision looked reckless at the time; his family had no connection whatsoever to the film industry, and the young lawyer had nothing to offer but a face the camera happened to like.

Learning the craft the slow way

His first appearance on film came in 1971, while he was still a student, as an unbilled extra in Anubhavangal Paalichakal. Nothing followed. Almost a decade passed before he was given a credited part, in Vilkkanundu Swapnangal in 1980, and a year later he carried a picture for the first time in Thrishna. Even then he was only one of several capable young men in an industry that was expanding fast and casting recklessly. The turn came in 1984 with Athirathram, after which he became one of the busiest actors in the country, sometimes appearing in more than a dozen releases a year.

What followed was a rivalry and a partnership that shaped Malayalam cinema for a generation. Alongside Mohanlal, Mammootty came to dominate the Kerala box office from the mid-1980s onward, the two of them offering audiences quite different pleasures. Where Mohanlal was fluid and instinctive, Mammootty was architectural, building performances from posture, diction and a very deliberate use of stillness. His voice, low and unhurried, became one of the recognisable instruments of Indian film.

The performances that defined him

In 1989 he played Chandu Chekavar in Oru Vadakkan Veeragatha, Hariharan's film from a screenplay by M. T. Vasudevan Nair that took the old northern ballads of Kerala and turned their villain into a wronged man. The role brought him his first National Film Award for Best Actor and remains, for many viewers, the performance against which the rest are measured. The following year Adoor Gopalakrishnan cast him in Mathilukal, adapted from Vaikom Muhammad Basheer's prison novella, in which he spends the film in conversation with a woman he never sees over a wall. In 1991 he played the fisherman Achootty in Amaram, and crossed into Tamil cinema for Mani Ratnam's Thalapathi.

A second National Award came for his work in two films of 1993, T. V. Chandran's Ponthan Mada and Adoor Gopalakrishnan's Vidheyan, the latter drawn from a story by Paul Zacharia and requiring him to play a brutal landlord in a language and register far from his own. His third National Award followed for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Jabbar Patel's English-language biographical film in which he portrayed the architect of the Indian Constitution. Between these came a long list of substantial work: Kandukondain Kandukondain in 2000, Kaazhcha in 2004, Paleri Manikyam and Kerala Varma Pazhassi Raja in 2009, and in 2018 the Tamil film Peranbu, where he played a father raising a daughter with cerebral palsy.

A late reinvention

Most actors of his vintage settle into comfortable repetition. Mammootty did the opposite. In his seventies he began working almost exclusively with young directors making difficult films, and in 2022 he set up Mammootty Kampany to finance exactly that kind of picture. The run that followed included Bheeshma Parvam in 2022, Lijo Jose Pellissery's Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam and Jeo Baby's Kaathal - The Core in 2023, and Rahul Sadasivan's monochrome folk horror Bramayugam, in which he plays the decaying feudal lord Koduman Potti. That last performance won him a fourth National Film Award for Best Actor, announced in 2026 at the seventy-second edition of the awards, an honour he shared that year with Kartik Aaryan.

Honours, and what Chandiroor gave

The Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on him in 1998 and the Padma Bhushan in 2026. The Kerala government honoured him with the Kerala Prabha in 2022, and he has received honorary doctorates from the University of Kerala, the University of Calicut and Mahatma Gandhi University. Outside the studio he has long served as chairman of Malayalam Communications, the group behind the Kairali television channels. He married Sulfath in 1979; their daughter is Surumi and their son is the actor Dulquer Salmaan.

A career of more than four hundred films across five decades resists easy summary, but a pattern is visible. Mammootty has repeatedly chosen the harder role over the safer one, and he has done so without ever leaving Malayalam cinema for a larger market. For a village in Alappuzha, the point is simple enough: a boy with no advantages beyond a good education and unusual patience became one of the most respected performers in the country, and never stopped returning to the language and landscape he came from.