Kamal Hassan’s daughters Shruti and Akshara have a bright future !!

As it has been in Bollywood the genes gifted by gifted parents have made celebrities out of quite a few second generation actors in Cinema. We have just seen the debut of Kamal Hassan’s younger daughter Akshara in Shamitabh.

The poor girl got brickbats for not living up to expectations. Akshara revealed her forte for “acting without acting” for the camera which is difficult for most professional actors. Akshara simply wasted it all on an audience which had built up high expectations of “acting” from her.

In recent times in Malayalam Cinema we have seen the emergence of a whole crop of actors who are unbelievably natural in their acting and by a coincidence some of them are offsprings of established cinema personalities. I was impressed and happy when I found out that the splendid, facile actor I was admiring while watching Anjali Menon’s Bangalore Days, a critical and box office success, was super star Mammootty’s son, Dulquer Salmaan.

Salmaan was a perfect match for the incredible acting abilities of Fahadh Faasil, son of reputed director Fazil. Together Salmaan and Fahadh created magic with their unaffected, spontaneous acting. Both should be in Hindi Cinema especially now that the histrionics in mainstream Hindi Cinema is undergoing a welcome change with the emergence of an actor like Nawazzuddin Sidiqui who is so versatile that he can be cast in any role and be apt in it.

If being genetically gifted gives an edge to the intrinsic talent an actor possesses, the examples of Fahadh, Salmaan, Vineeth and Prithviraj are enough to prove the assumption right. Vineeth, son of the enormously talented actor, screenwriter and director Srinivasan is currently known for his own merits. He is a multitalented mechanical engineer who followed in the footsteps of his father and is now recognized as much for the natural gift for acting he has inherited from his father as for the additional assets he possesses as a playback singer. Vineeth is a promising screenwriter and director as well.

Prithviraj is the son of one of the more respected actors of Malayalam cinema. Prithvi grew up in a healthy film environment watching his father Sukumaran, mother Mallika and brother Indrajit don the greasepaint and become the characters they were playing before the cameras. The premature death of his father following a massive heart

attack at the age of 49 devastated the family and Prithvi followed his brother to the studios to become an actor even before he entered his teens. Prithviraj  has the additional asset of a great voice for playback singing. Quite like his father who was a professor of English before he stepped into the film world, Prithvi speaks English with

admirable command.