Priya Anand (born on 17 September 1986) is an Indian film actress and model who appears in Tamil and Telugu films. She appeared in several popular Tamil and Telugu films including, Vaamanan and Leader.
Born in Chennai, Priya is the only child of Radha, a Tamilian mother and Bharadwaj Anand, a half Telugu, half Marathi father. Because of her mixed regional background, she was brought up in both her parents' hometowns, Chennai, Tamil Nadu and Hyderabad, Andra Pradesh, becoming fluent in Tamil as well as Telugu. Besides her mother tongues, Priya is proficient in English, which she usually speaks at home, Bengali, Hindi and Spanish languages as well.
Priya, who describes herself as "naturally extremely hyperactive", became fascinated by films, developing an interest in cinema, since childhood, and noted that she has been dreaming of getting into the film industry and working on technical aspects of film making, but confesses she never thought of becoming an actor. She moved to the U. S., where she pursued her higher studies. Keeping her later career in mind, she studied Communications and Journalism at University of Albany. After completing her education, she returned to India in 2008 and since, stays with her grandparents in Chennai. However, she then ventured into modeling, appearing in various television commercials like Nutrine Maha Lacto, Prince Jewellery and Cadbury Dairy Milk.
She was subsequently receiving acting offers from directors, who had seen her television commercials. She was initially supposed to make her acting debut in the Tamil film Pugaippadam, which she signed up first, but since its release was delayed until 2010, her first release became the action-thriller Vaamanan, directed by newcomer Ahmed. She was assigned for the project in late 2008 to portray Divya, a simple girl next door, whom the male lead character, essayed by Jai, would fall in love with. The film created some anticipation before its release, mainly due to its hit music by Yuvan Shankar Raja, enabling a big opening, but fared only averagely at the Chennai box office. In 2010, three of her films released within a short span of time, the first on New Year 2010, which was the college-life based drama Pugaippadam, a film revolving around the friendship between seven students. Priya enacted the charcater of one of the student roles, a Malayali Christian named Shiney George. The film opened to mixed reviews and proved to be commercially unsuccessful. She next starred in her first Telugu film, AVM Productions' Sekhar Kammula directed political drama Leader, alongside newcomers Rana Daggubati and Richa Gangopadhyay. She recalls that an assistant director of Kammula had found her on Facebook and invited her and how she had to audition thrice for the film to prove herself and eventually got the offer. She played Ratna Prabha, a television channel reporter and friend to a young man, who would later go on to become a political leader. Although her screen presence in the film was very limited, her performance garnered overwhelming response and was well received, while the film itself earned positive reviews and became a critical success. The Dil Raju-produced family entertainer Rama Rama Krishna Krishna is her most recent release, in which she plays the love interest of the film's male protagonist. She is currently working on a bilingual Tamil-Telugu project by noted ad filmmaker Jayendra, in which she would act opposite Siddharth.
