Besides being an intense actress, she is also a social and political activist. She is a feminist who has fought for women's causes and slum dwellers. These activities may have led to many controversies, but she knows what is right and what she is doing. She is a self-made person.
Shabana Azmi was born to eminent parents in 1953. She is the daughter of communist Urdu poet and lyricist Kaifi Azmi and actress Shaukat Azmi. She comes from a family of talented people and has immense of talent in every drop of her blood. This talent was at first exploited by noted filmmaker Khwaja Ahmed Abbas in Faasle. But as her debut film was consuming a lot of time, she was allowed to do other films as well. This enabled her to do films with other great directors like Shyam Benegal's Ankur. She was so appreciated that she became a regular in his other films like Nishaant, Junoon, Mandi and Susman. Shabana also had the opportunity of working with Satyajit Ray in films like Shatranj Ke Khiladi. She was such a good actress that all the top art directors wanted her in their films. So Shabana continued doing films like Khandhar with Mrinal Sen, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyu Aata Hain with Saeed Mirza, Paar with Gautam Ghosh, Sparsh and Disha with Sai Paranjpe, Sati with Aparna Sen and Arth with Mahesh Bhatt. But it would be wrong to say that she only concentrated in art cinema. She has also had a few good commercial movies like Amar Akbar Anthony, Lahoo Ke Do Rang, Parvarish, Fakira and Jwalamukhi mostly with Vinod Khanna. Her heart though remained in doing more of art films.
Married to noted storywriter and lyricist Javed Akhtar, she continues appearing on the silver screen. Of late, she has done few chosen movies like Fire which brought a lot of controversy because of traces of lesbianism in it. Then it was Godmother which was felt to be inspired from a real life story. This film took a lot of time to get released but once released, won a whole lot of awards and critical acclaim. Yet another film of hers which saw the light of controversy was Deepa Mehta's Water. Though she shaved off her head for this film, it finally had to be shelved because of staunch followers of Hinduism. Controversy and Shabana seem to be running parallel to each other.
