Kani Kusruti is an Indian actress known primarily for her work in Malayalam films. She first gained recognition in with the film Kerala Cafe , in which her performance was critically acclaimed. Kani was born in Cheruvakkal, a small village in Thiruvananthapuram , Kerala, to social activist and rationalist parents Jayasree A.
Her parents had dropped their last names to erase the social hierarchy marker that comes with last names in India. At 15, she invented her last name "Kusruti" meaning "mischievous" in Malayalam to fill in a requirement in her class 10th exam application. She grew up in Thiruvananthapuram, where she got introduced to the Abhinaya Theatre Research Centre, [ 4 ] [ 5 ] "a common platform for theatre practitioners".
She later moved to Thrissur , where she enrolled in the theatre arts program at the Thrissur School of Drama, between and At Abhinaya, Kusruti made her theatre debut in Baudhayana's classic farce Bhagavadajjukam.
She played the lead role of Vasantsena in the production from to She rendered the part of Kamala in M. Jyotish's stage adaptation of Hermann Hesse 's Siddhartha.
In , the production was invited to the Villeneuve en Scene Festival d'Avignon. In , she played a Naxalite in the Mohanlal starrer Shikkar , but her nuanced rendition of a sex worker in the film Cocktail got her noticed by mainstream audiences.
