Nagarjuna shares how his grandmother dressed his father ANR as a girl, which shaped his acting journey

Nagarjuna recently shared a fascinating story about his father, the legendary Akkineni Nageswara Rao (ANR), and how his grandmother's desire for a girl child influenced his early acting career. During an event, Nagarjuna revealed that his grandmother often dressed ANR as a girl during his childhood because she longed for a daughter. This upbringing likely played a role in shaping ANR's path to becoming one of the most celebrated actors in Telugu cinema.

Nagarjuna recounted that ANR came from humble beginnings, growing up in a farming family. He said, "When he started, he came from a very humble family, had a very humble beginning, a farmer's family, and it was near Gudi Gwada in AP, maybe it was a madras residency then, yeah, then from a village which didn't have electricity, and he had come from there."

As a child, ANR began performing on stage, often taking on female roles due to societal restrictions on women acting at the time. Nagarjuna fondly recalled that ANR looked quite charming and dressed as a girl, which helped him gain confidence and experience in front of an audience. By the age of 15, he had already started playing leading female roles on stage.

He said, "My grandmother always wanted to have a woman child, and there were no woman children then, so she used to dress him up. I guess these are all these things that led him to be an actor. In those days, women were not allowed to act on stage, they could not be actors or beyond stage, so he started playing a woman's role, a girl's role, he first became a heroine on stage at the very young age of maybe 15 years. He used to look very cute and pretty in that appearance. I still have the photograph of him dressed up like a girl, he looked exactly like my older sister, Satya."

Nagarjuna also shared an interesting story about how fate played its role in ANR's life. He said, "As fate took its turn through its dice, he was at a railway station, and one famous producer, the Kant Sahu Balramayar, he saw him from his seat, him walking, and he said nice eyes, nice nose, nice this thing, whatever he thought of them, call the boy and said would you like to act, and the rest is history."