Suniel Shetty is an Indian actor, film producer, television personality, and entrepreneur, born in a Tulu-speaking Bunt family on 11 August 1961 in Mulki, Mangalore. Since 1991 he is married to Mana Shetty, a businesswoman, designer, and social activist born to a Gujarati Muslim architect and a Punjabi Hindu social activist, and they have two children, a daughter Athiya Shetty and a son Ahan Shetty.
He is predominantly active in Hindi films he has also worked in Tamil, Telugu, English, Marathi, Malayalam, and Kannada films. In a career spanning almost 30 years, he has acted in over 100 films.
He is the owner of the production house Popcorn Entertainment Private Limited. He has produced a number of films including Khel – No Ordinary Game, Rakht, and Bhagam Bhag, under the banner of Popcorn Motion Pictures.
He made his debut in Hindi films in 1992 at the age of 31 with Balwaan, opposite Divya Bharti. The film helped him to retain his position in Bollywood as an action hero.
He was one of the highest-paid Bollywood actors in the 1990s. He was involved primarily in action films throughout the 1990s, playing the male protagonist in most of the movies he acted in during the decade. From early 2000, he mainly appeared in multi-starrers across genres.
In 2005, on the eve of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s 61st birth anniversary, the Mumbai Pradesh Youth Congress honored Shetty with the Rajiv Gandhi Award.
Shetty won the Filmfare Award for Best Villain in 2001 for Dhadkan.In 2009, Shetty bagged South Asian International Film Festival’s Best Actor Award for his role in the Naxalites-based Indian movie Red Alert.
In 2019, Suneil invested an undisclosed amount in Pune-based online health and fitness start-up Fitter. Its founder Jitendra Chouksey launched Fittr in January 2016 as a community on Facebook to address the challenges in the fitness industry, Fittr now claims over 100,000 fitness transformations and a highly engaged community of 550,000 members.
