Ashok Kumar (actor)

Ashok Kumar
Portrait of Ashok Kumar
Native name	অশোক কুমার গাঙ্গুলী
Born	Kumudlal Kunjilal Ganguly (1911-10-13)13 October 1911 Bhagalpur, Bihar, India
Died	10 December 2001(2001-12-10) (aged 90) Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Other names	Sanjay Ashok Kumar Dadamoni Kumudlal Ganguly
Occupation	Actor, painter
Years active	1936–1997
Spouse(s)	Shobha Devi
Parent(s)	Kunjilal Ganguly Gauri devi Ganguly
Relatives	Kishore Kumar (Brother) Anoop Kumar (Brother) Sati devi (Sister) Sashadhar Mukherjee (Brother-in-law) See Ganguly family See Mukherjee-Samarth family
Awards	Padma Bhushan (1999)

Ashok Kumar (13 October 1911 – 10 December 2001), born Kumudlal Ganguly and also fondly called Dadamoni, was an Indian film actor who attained iconic status in Indian cinema. He was honoured in 1988 with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the highest national award for cinema artists, by the Government of India and also received the Padma Bhushan in 1999 for his contributions to Indian cinema. He is considered to be one of India's finest ever actors, playing leading, negative and character roles with equal panache.

Ashok Kumar was born Kumudlal Ganguly in Bhagalpur, then in the Bengal Presidency and now lying in Bihar. His father, Kunjlal Ganguly, was a lawyer while his mother, Gouri Devi, was a home-maker. Kumudlal (as he was then known) was the eldest of four children. A couple of years younger to him was his only sister, Sati Devi, who was married at a very young age to Sashadhar Mukherjee and became the matriarch of a large "film family". More than fourteen years younger than Kumudlal was his next brother, Kalyan (b.1926), who later took the screen name Anoop Kumar, and youngest of all was Abhas (b.1929), whose screen name was Kishore Kumar and who became a phenomenally successful playback singer of Hindi films. Although the eldest of the three brothers by several years, Ashok Kumar outlived all his siblings. In fact, he stopped celebrating his birthday after his youngest brother, Kishore, died on that very day (Ashok's birthday) in 1987.

While still a teenager, and well before he had even given thought to a career in films, the young Kumudlal was married to Shobha in a match arranged by their parents in the usual Indian style. Their lifelong marriage was a harmonious and conventional one, and despite his film career, the couple retained a very middle-class outlook and value system, bringing up their children in a remarkably simple home, with traditional values. They were the parents of one son named Aroop Ganguly and three daughters named Bharati Patel, Rupa Verma and Preeti Ganguly. Their son, Aroop Kumar Ganguly, featured as the hero of exactly one film, Bezubaan (1962), which flopped at the box office. He then made a career in the corporate world. Ashok's eldest daughter, Bharati Patel, is the mother of the actress Anuradha Patel, who is married to the actor Kanwaljeet Singh. Ashok's second daughter, Rupa Verma, is the wife of the actor and comedian Deven Verma. Ashok's youngest daughter, Preeti Ganguly, was the only one of his daughters to enter the film industry. She acted as a comedian in several Hindi films during the 1970s and 1980s, and died unmarried in 2012.