Born: June 24, 1979 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Birth Name: Vera Mindy Chokalingam
Height: 5′ 4″ (1,63 m)
Vera Mindy Chokalingam (born June 24, 1979), known professionally as Mindy Kaling, is an American comedian, actress and writer. From 2005 to 2012, she played Kelly Kapoor in the NBC sitcom The Office. In addition to acting in it, she was a writer, executive producer, and director. For her work on the series, she received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series in 2010.
Kaling gained wider attention for creating, writing, producing and starring in the Fox/Hulu comedy series The Mindy Project (2012–2017). She was also the co-creator, writer, and producer of the NBC sitcom Champions (2018) and the Hulu miniseries Four Weddings and a Funeral (2019). Kaling’s film career includes voice work in Despicable Me (2010), Wreck It Ralph (2012), and Inside Out (2015). She had starring roles in the comedy The Night Before (2015), the fantasy adventure A Wrinkle in Time, the heist comedy Ocean’s 8 (both 2018), and the comedy Late Night (2019).
In addition to her work in film and television, Kaling has written two New York Times best-selling memoirs, titled Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (2011) and Why Not Me? (2015).
While a 19-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth, Kaling was an intern on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Kaling said she was a terrible intern, “less of a ‘make copies’ intern and more of a ‘stalk Conan’ intern.” Kaling has said that she never saw a family like hers on TV, which gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing. She thinks the “everyone against me mentality” is what she learned as a child of immigrants. She named her Mindy Project character Mindy Lahiri after author Jhumpa Lahiri.
After college, Kaling moved to Brooklyn, New York. Kaling said one of her worst job experiences was as a production assistant for three months on the Crossing Over With John Edward psychic show. She described it as “depressing.” During this same time, Kaling performed stand-up comedy.
Kaling devised her stage name after discovering while doing stand-up comedy that emcees would have trouble pronouncing her last name, Chokalingam, and sometimes made jokes about it. She toured solo as well as with Craig Robinson before he was on The Office.
In August 2002, Kaling portrayed Ben Affleck in an off-Broadway play called Matt & Ben, which she co-wrote with her best friend from college, Brenda Withers—who played Matt Damon. The play was named one of Time magazine’s “Top Ten Theatrical Events of The Year” and was “a surprise hit” at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival. Initially, Withers and Kaling had, “for their own entertainment, mockingly pretended to be the best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck; that pretending spawned Matt & Ben, the goofy play that reimagined how Damon and Affleck came to write the movie Good Will Hunting.”
Kaling wrote a blog, Things I’ve Bought That I Love, which reemerged on her website on September 29, 2011. The blog was written under the name Mindy Ephron, “a name Kaling chose because she was amused by the idea of her 20-something Indian-American self as a long-lost Ephron sister.”
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