On June 17, 2020, the Kannada film industry lost one of its gems, Chiranjeevi Sarja. The actor came from a family with roots in the film industry. His maternal grandfather was Shakti Prasad, and his uncle Arjun Sarja and his younger brother Dhruva Sarja are all actors. While his other uncle Kishore Sarja is a director. At the beginning of his career, he worked as an assistant director under his uncle Arjun for four years.
Later, in 2009, he made his acting debut with the Kannada movie Vayuputra. It was a romantic action film directed by Kishore Sarja. Produced by Arjun Sarja, the film’s rest of the cast included Ambareesh, Aindrita Ray, Ajay and Sadhu Kokhila.
The film was the remake of the Tamil film Sandakozhi. For this movie, he won the Innovative Film Award For Best Debut Male. After this, he worked in many popular movies like Varadhanayaka, the supernatural thriller Whistle, horror comedy Chandralekha, and the action film Rudra Tandava.
Among other notable films of Sarja are the mystery thriller Aatagara, which is based on Agatha Christie’s book And Then There Were None and the horror film Aake. Both of them were directed by K M Chaitanya.
Sarja got married to actor Meghana Raj. And their son Raayan Raj was born four months after his death.
On June 6, 2020, Sarja suffered from convulsions and breathlessness. Later, he developed chest pain and collapsed. The doctor declared him dead citing cardiac arrest as the cause of death.
In 11 years of his acting career, Sarja acted in more than 20 films. Three of his films were released in 2020. But Shivarjuna turned out to be his last appearance before he passed away. He had five more films lined up in various stages of production.
