Nagarjuna was born on August 29, 1959 in Chennai, the son of actor Akkineni Nageswara Rao. Later their family shifted to Hyderabad where he did his schooling at Hyderabad Public School, and Intermediate from Little Flower Junior College, Hyderabad and BE (Mechanical) from College of Engineering, Guindy Anna university, in between shifted to University of Michigan, Ann arbor and completed Bachelors. Nagarjuna completed MS (Automobile) from University of Louisiana at Lafayatte, USA. [1] Later, he ended up in acting career.
Nagarjuna's first movie Vikram released on 24 May 1986 (before this he acted in Sudigundalu as a child artist). In 1989 he starred in Geethanjali, a love story that was directed by Maniratnam which was dubbed into Tamil as well. In the same year, Nagarjuna followed with Shiva (1989 film), an action film directed by Ram Gopal Varma which was also dubbed into Tamil as 'Udhayam'. He subsequently made his Bollywood debut with the Hindi remake of the same film Shiva (1989 film). He did some different roles in the movies like Killer, Nirnayam. President Gari Pellam was released in 1993. He followed with films, Varasudu, Gharana Bullodu, and Allari Alludu, Criminal (1994) and Sisindri to name a few. In 1994, he ventured into comedy for the first time with Hello Brother. Hello Brother was an instant hit and was later remade into Judwaa, a Hindi film starring Salman Khan. Hello Brother became a super hit in Tamil too, when it was dubbed into that language. In 1996, Nagarjuna starred as well as produced, Ninne Pelladatha, which was directed by Krishna Vamsi and co-starred the National Award winning Hindi actress, Tabu. It was rumoured that Nagarjuna signed Krishna Vamsi upon seeing just ten minutes of the director's, then yet to be released debut film, Gulabi. It went on to become the biggest hit of that year, Sandeep Chowta was the music director for that film . Later, Nagarjuna took up the challenge of portraying Annamacharya, the 15th century Telugu singer and poet, in Annamayya (film). In 2000 after moderately successful Sitaramaraju film, Nagarjuna starred in Nuvvu Vastavani which went on to become a blockbuster. His subsequent films that year, Ninne Premistha and Azad (film) too met with commercial success. Later, he starred in the romantic comedies, Santhosham and Manmadhudu, both of which were successful at the box office. Shivamani capped off a golden run of six continuously successful films in Nagarjuna's acting career. During that time, he produced the blockbuster film, Sathyam, launching the acting career of his nephew, Sumanth.