Seema Biswas

Seema Biswas is an Indian actress of Hindi films and theater who first drew wide attention as Phoolan Devi in Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994), a performance that won her the National Film Award for Best Actress. Born in Nalbari, she had acted in Assamese cinema earlier, and Shekhar Kapur offered her the part after seeing her with the NSD Repertory Company. She took the Screen Award for Best Supporting Actress for Khamoshi: The Musical (1996) and later won the Best Actress Genie Award for playing Shakuntala in Deepa Mehta's Water (2005), as well as the 2000 Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. Her films include Bhoot (2003), Vivah (2006) and Half Girlfriend (2017), and she has taken roles in Marathi, Malayalam and Tamil cinema. She has also appeared in many television shows, among them The Family Man. She was a jury member at the 45th International Film Festival of India in 2014.