Jaya Bachchan

She started her career with a supporting role in Satyajit Ray's Bengali film, Mahanagar at the age of 15, with Anil Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee. Prior to this, she had appeared in two Bengali films: a 13-minute short film, Suman, and a Bengali comedy Dhanni Meye (1971), as Uttam Kumar's sister-in law.

Inspired by her experience with Ray, she decided to join Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune to learn acting, and passed out with the gold medal, and she was also picked out to play the eponymous role of Guddi in the 1971 Hrishikesh Mukherjee film, Guddi in which she played a schoolgirl obsessed with film star Dharmendra. Guddi was a success, and she moved to Mumbai and soon picked other roles, however her role of a 14-year-old school girl, aided by her petite looks, created the girl-next-door image for her, which she was often associated with through the rest of her career. Though she tried to break out of the mould with glamourous roles as in Jawani Diwani (1972) and a negative character of the heroine faking amnesia, in Anamika (1973), she was mostly recognised for roles of this sort, which were credited with epitomising middle-class sensibility and which she played amiably in films of "middle-cinema" directors like Gulzar, Basu Chatterjee and indeed Hrishikesh Mukherjee.

On 3 June 1973, she married actor Amitabh Bachchan. The couple have two children: Shweta Bachchan-Nanda and Abhishek Bachchan, who is also an actor. Shweta is married to industrialist Nikhil Nanda in Delhi, and has two children, Navya Naveli and Agastya Nanda,[18] while Abhishek Bachchan is married to Aishwarya Rai, also an actor who recently gave birth to a baby girl Aaradhya Bachchan.