Born on March 13, 1982 into a Sikh family in Pilani, Rajasthan, Nimrat Kaur's father Major Bhupinder Singh was an Indian Army officer. She changed cities and schools every few years due to her father being in the Army. The family was living in Patiala when her father was kidnapped and killed by terrorists when she was just 11 in 1994. Nimrat, along with her mother Avinash Kaur and younger sister Rubina Kaur, then moved to Noida.
She studied at the prestigious institutions Delhi Public School, Noida, and Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University before moving to Mumbai to become an actress. Nimrat first started as a model and did theatre alongside to hone her acting skills. She appeared in two famous music videos for Kumar Sanu's Tera Mera Pyar and Shreya Ghoshal's Yeh Kya Hua in 2004.
In 2005, Nimrat was seen in a blink-and-miss role in Shoojit Sircar's war drama Yahaan. She made her film debut in the 2006 English film One Night with the King. Her first major role came in Vasan Bala-directed and Anurag Kashyap-produced Peddlers in 2012, which never got released. In 2013, Nimrat broke through with her excellent performance in The Lunchbox. Also starring Irrfan Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui, the Ritesh Batra directorial is regarded among one of the finest Indian films in the 21st century.
Nimrat actually became famous after she starred opposite Akshay Kumar in the 2016 film Airlift. The actress has been quite picky in her projects and has since then appeared in the 2022 film Dasvi with Abhishek Bachchan and in the 2023 movie Sajini Shinde Ka Viral Video. Nimrat has also been a part of international shows Homeland, Wayward Pines, and Foundation, and Indian web series The Test Case and School of Lies.
When Nimrat Kaur opened up how her father was killed and how she got closure 19 years after his death
In an interview with Times of India in 2015, Nimrat said, "My father was a young Army major, an engineer posted with the Border Roads in a place called Verinag. If you travel to Srinagar from Jammu, there is a tunnel called Jawahar Tunnel that comes on the way. And the first valley after that is Verinag. Kashmir was not a family station, so we continued living in Patiala when he went to Kashmir. We were on our winter vacation in January 1994 and visiting our father in Kashmir, when the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen kidnapped him from his place of work and after seven days, terminated him. They had made some ridiculous demands of some terrorists to be released that he obviously did not agree to. He was just 44 when he died. We got the news and flew back with his body to Delhi and I saw his body for the first time only in Delhi. We then moved to Noida and lived with my nana-nani for a few months before my mother bought her own place with my father’s pension money and our savings and we moved out. We never went back to Patiala again except after a few months to pick up our luggage. The government gave us a piece of land in Rajasthan and my father was posthumously awarded the Shaurya Chakra."
"Coincidentally, he got awarded the Shaurya Chakra on my birthday, March 13. His name is now written as Bhupinder Singh SC, SC standing for Shaurya Chakra. I remember my The Lunchbox premiered in Cannes and I immediately went back to Kashmir in June 2013 for the first time after my father’s death. I could sense that my life was going to shift in a big way and I wanted to go back to Kashmir for my closure and I did. I spent 10 days there all alone. I went to Verinag, there’s a point there dedicated to my father. I came back and got a tattoo done on my wrist which reads, 'Zenab', meaning a father’s precious jewel that brings glory to his name", she concluded.
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