Telangana Shakuntala

Telangana Shakuntala was born on 9th June 1951 in the Maharashtra district in India. She was born into a middle-class family, her father worked in the army while her mother managed the household. She was known as Raveena before she changed her name owing to her love for the Telangana dialect of Telugu language. From her teenage years, she started acting in various plays, and her debut performance on stage was featured at the prestigious Rabindra Bharati auditorium, which was named as a tribute to Rabindranath Tagore. Following her successful performance on stage, she was roped in by various troops to feature in their plays. After she performed a significant amount of plays, she decides to take her acting career one step further by acting in movies. Her first film was one directed by Goutam Ghose.Released in 1979, her debut film was titled as ‘Maa Bhoomi’ and it was a Telugu movie. Her passion for Telugu grew as her career progressed and she gained a lot of popularity for having the ability to use several dialects of Telugu.

She proved throughout all her films that she was adaptable and versatile. So attracted to the Telugu language that she wanted to be reincarnated as a Telugu speaking person. Her roles were mainly of supporting characters such as comedy roles or negative characters. Shakuntala has also acted in many Tamil films, adapting quickly nad efficiently to the Tamil language just like she adopted to Telugu. In 1980, she was awarded the prestigious Nandini award for her contribution to the Telugu film industry. Throughout her career, she had acted in over a hundred films, but her career was cut short by her unexpected death at the age of sixty-three due to a cardiac arrest. She died on 14th June 2014 in her house at Hyderabad.