Atul Agnihotri was born in Delhi on June 24, 1970. He was brought up in Mumbai where his father, Rohit Agnihotri, tried his hand at acting in films, but ended up working in the field of outdoor hoardings. During his childhood, his older cousin Rati Agnihotri who had already started her career as an actress, lived with his family for two years, and Atul Agnihotri began his own film career, appearing in one of her films as a child actor.

In his college years, Agnihotri became deeply involved with acting and theatre, and when his father became unwell, he turned to films for a steady job. For four years, he worked as an assistant director to Pankaj Parashar, and also restarted his career as an actor in his adult life with Mahesh Bhatt’s Sir (1993) and Aatish: Feel the Fire (1994), which was directed by Parashar’s previous assistant director Sanjay Gupta.

He acted in several other films in the following decade, including Yeh Aashiqui Meri (1998), Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam (2002) as well as some Gujarati and Bengali projects. 2004 marked the start of Agnihotri’s career as a writer and director with the release of his film Dil Ne Jise Apna Kaha (2004). Four years later, he came out with his second directorial venture Hello (2008), which he also produced. Neither film fared well commercially or critically.

Following these two projects, Agnihotri focused on production – which he had been trained in during his years with Pankaj Parashar. His next production was Bodyguard (2011), which he considers to be his redemption. The film was hugely successful and became the highest grossing film of 2011 and won numerous awards across several categories.

Agnihotri released two productions, Jai Ho (2014) and O Teri (2014). His next releases are scheduled to be Hello 2 and Bodyguard 2, both being sequels to his earlier films. Though he has not acted in a film for many years, he is open to the idea of it, claiming that he refuses acting jobs only so he can focus on what he currently wants to do, that is, producing. In terms of his work, Agnihotri has tried to abide by a saying repeated to him by his father-in-law Salim Khan. “There are no marks for good handwriting, only the content matters.”