SelvaraghavanTamil Actor – Movies List & Song Lyrics

Selvaraghavan was born to Tamil film director Kasthuri Raja and Vijayalakshmi on 5 March 1975. He has a brother, Dhanush, who is an actor, and two sisters, who are both doctors. In his youth, one of his eyes was removed after he developed retinal cancer.

Despite coming from a family from the film industry, Selvaraghavan and his sisters were persuaded by their parents to seek a career with an academic background. He subsequently went on to attain a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering, though his exam performances were unremarkable and he acknowledges he was "never going to become one of the best". During his studies, he engaged part-time in different career paths in a process he describes as "soul-searching", before finding satisfaction as a writer. After he graduated in 1997, he approached producers to fund his screenplay writing, but was unsuccessful and often remained at home as an unemployed graduate.

On 15 December 2006, he married actress Sonia Agarwal, with whom he had previously worked with on three films. After their two-year marriage, Sonia Agarwal and Selvaraghavan filed for divorce with mutual consent in a Chennai family court on 9 August 2009.

Selvaraghavan married Gitanjali Raman on 19 June 2011, daughter of former Advocate General of Tamil Nadu P. S. Raman. Gitanjali had worked as his assistant director in Mayakkam Enna. The couple have a daughter named Leelavathi born on 20 January 2012, and a son born on 7 October 2013 named Omkar. The couple had their third child, a baby boy on 7 January 2021 who they named Rishikesh.

His family faced financial pressures in the early 2000s with his father being out of work, and subsequently they decided to put their remaining earnings into a venture titled Thulluvadho Ilamai (2002), which Selvaraghavan had written. Featuring his brother Dhanush in his first role, alongside Sherin and Abhinay, the film told the coming-of-age story of six high school students and featured a hit soundtrack by Yuvan Shankar Raja. After taking a small opening, the film began to get teen audiences to cinema halls for its adolescent themes, while also being publicised in quarters as a "soft porn" film. It subsequently went on to become a sleeper hit and won positive reviews from critics for breaking the stereotypes of Tamil films. After release, Selvaraghavan stated that he had also directed the film, but was forced to credit his more established film-maker father Kasthuri Raja as the sole director, in order to help the project find a distributor.

Following the success of the previous film, the team chose to collaborate again with the psychotic romantic thriller Kaadhal Kondein (2003), credited as Selvaraghavan's first film. The venture, produced by his home production, also marked the first collaboration of Selvaraghavan with cinematographer Arvind Krishna, whom he would later associate with regularly. Selvaraghavan had written the script for the film in the late 1990s and had first narrated the story to Dhanush in their shared bedroom at home, before asking him to play the lead role of Vinod after the success of Thulluvadho Illamai. The story explores the mind of a youth who is mentally and physically abused in his childhood. The lack of a mother's love haunts the protagonist throughout the film as the girl of his infatuation is killed. Becoming a psychopath, he desperately tries to woo his newly found lady love and his efforts culminate in a thrilling climax. The film opened in July 2003 to unanimously positive reviews, with a reviewer from The Hindu noting: "his story, screenplay, dialogue and direction are focused and hit the bull's eye straightway — hardly missing the mark." The film subsequently went on to become a blockbuster and provided career breakthroughs for both Selvaraghavan and Dhanush in the Tamil film industry. Since its release, the film has been remade into several Indian languages, while Selvaraghavan was briefly associated with the Hindi remake to be produced by Boney Kapoor in 2004, but the project did not eventually materialise.