“Just an inch or two to the left, please … Now look just above my head … And directly into the lens …” Koirala seems to react to the snapper’s requests before the words have even left his lips, and sometimes she pre-empts his instructions. As one of Bollywood’s most successful female actors in recent decades, the 48-year-old Nepali has, after all, done this hundreds of times before.

Koirala is in Hong Kong to take part in the fifth edition of Hong Kong’s India by the Bay festival – a calendar of events over nine days celebrating the South Asian country’s rich cultural heritage through music, dance, film, food, theatre, yoga, literature and art, and which wraps up on March 9.

Peering down from our lofty perch in the Shangri-La, one can just make out the Asia Society Hong Kong Centre, on Admiralty’s Justice Drive. Later in the day, the venue will host an India by the Bay gathering titled “In conversation with Manisha Koirala”. During that session, the veteran of more than 80 feature films will shine a light on how she became one of the most versatile, in-demand and highest-paid female Bollywood actors of the 1990s.

She will also confront how her charmed life unravelled in the most dramatic fashion.

The first decade of the new millennium held professional and personal highs and lows for Koirala, and she made a number of poor career deci­sions, entered into some unhappy romances and increasingly turned to alcohol for succour. Then, in 2012, in the immediate wake of a failed marriage, she was diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer (there is, of course, no stage five with the disease).

The entire roller-coaster experience – and how a talented, privileged Bollywood golden girl fell into a self-destructive tailspin, battled a life-threatening condition and came out the other side as a changed, more appre­ciative human being – is bluntly set forth in Koirala’s autobiography Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life (2018).

With the photographer happy and portraits in his proverbial bag, refreshingly candid Koirala begins her redemptive tale at the beginning, before she was born (in Kathmandu, in 1970) into one of Nepal’s most prominent political families.

Her great-grandfather, Krishna Prasad Koirala, was a political activist who agitated to bring democracy to Nepal and was effectively exiled from the Himalayan kingdom to hole up in neighbouring India, and the clan have kept feet in both countries ever since.

Her grandfather, Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala (better known as B.P. Koirala), was also a staunch champion of democracy, and active in the struggle for Indian indepen­dence. The founder of the Nepali Congress political party and a prolific author, he was also the first democratically elected prime minister of Nepal. However, his time in office lasted only 18 months, from May 1959 to December 1960, when the reigning monarch, King Mahendra, threw him in jail, where he languished for eight years. When B.P. died, in Kathmandu, in 1982, he was so revered by his countrymen that an estimated half a million people attended his funeral.

Manisha’s father, Prakash Koirala, is a former Nepali minister of environment, science and technology. Other family members have also held the post of prime minister and various senior positions within government.

With this illustrious background, Manisha effectively grew up between the two countries, schooling in the holy Indian city of Varanasi but with strong family ties across the border to the north. Though she was only 11 when B.P. died, she recalls her grandfather fondly. For a time, she even carried a small silver box, given to her by her grandmother, containing some of his ashes, which she would pray to.

“I was his first grandchild, so he showered me with his love and affection and guidance,” Koirala says, adding that her grandfather would encourage her passions for classical dance and other cultural pursuits. “When he was there, the house would be flooded with people and, when he left, it would be like you could hear a pin drop.”

Young Manisha knew her grandfather was adored by many people, but did not know why.

“I would ask my grandmother about him. ‘Why is he so great?’ And she would say that he doesn’t care about himself, about his own well-being, but that he is dreaming of democracy for the people of Nepal.”

Though Koirala’s description of her early years suggests enthusiasm for the performing arts, she had expected to become something else.

“In my family, there were only three professions,” she says. “Either you were a doctor or an engineer or a politi­cian, there was no fourth profession, so I always thought I’d fall into being a medical student.”

She smiles at the memory, adding that less weighty passions could also be enjoyed in the Koirala household.

“We were big-time Bollywood film buffs, my grand­mother especially, and every Sunday we would go to a theatre and watch a Bollywood film.”

The focus of one Sunday outing, she remembers, when she was still a young teenager, was “a really good film” called Masoom (1983), its title meaning “innocent”. It was not an all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood extravaganza but a serious-minded drama concerning a family almost torn apart when a child, the result of the husband’s extramarital affair, enters their lives.

“After watching it, when we got home, I made everyone sit and acted out what the young kid had done. So I had an interest, but even then I could never imagine I would be in films some day. That just seemed impossible.”Some years later, with Koirala still a teenager, a cousin of her mother cast her in a television commercial that (long before the concept of “going viral” even existed) “became the rage in Nepal”.

The upshot was that Koirala was offered a part in 1989 Nepali romantic movie Pheri Bhetaula. “I thought, ‘What the heck. It’s good pocket money,’” she says. But soon the headstrong scion of a heavyweight political dynasty had “got hooked” on the idea of becoming an actor, and the bright, twinkling lights of Bollywood beckoned.

Though eyebrows were raised at her choice, ulti­mately it was respected. But the family’s elevated reputation carried great responsibility. “I wanted to be among the best actors in India,” Koirala says. “That’s what my grandmother had told me: ‘No matter what field you go into, just make sure you are the best.’ I was driven by that.”

Nevertheless, success did not come overnight. Her Bollywood debut was in high-grossing 1991 clan-feud drama Saudagar, but her career took off only in 1994, when she starred as the daughter of a revolutionary fighting against British rule in 1942: A Love Story, her performance earning a nomination for best actress at the Filmfare Awards (India’s version of the Oscars).

The following year, Koirala played a Muslim married to a Hindu during the Bombay riots of 1992-93, in Tamil-language romantic drama Bombay, and took home the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Performance, and the Filmfare Award for Best Actress – Tamil. Koirala was now in her stride: in 1995 and 1996, no fewer than 12 films were released with her name appearing boldly and early in the credits.

Although she did enjoy the glamorous trappings of fame as her star rose, Koirala says she remembers the 90s more for the 18-hour days and her punishing schedule.

“At the core of it all there is a lot of hard work, but I was tuned into that way of thinking,” she says. “The people around me always told me, ‘So and so worked so hard; so and so worked really hard.’ I knew there was no escaping the hard-work route.”

Throughout the rest of the decade, Koirala was one of the most sought-after actors in Indian cinema. Looking back, she most relishes the memory of how the finest directors came knocking at her door. “Serious filmmakers started noting my work, which was great, and I got an opportunity to work with them. I hadn’t even been sure if I was a good actor.”

By 1999, however, the lustre was fading from her silver-screen dream, with Koirala tormented by what she describes in Healed (written with the help of Indian author Neelam Kumar, herself a cancer survivor) as “this routine of getting up, putting on make-up, going out for location shooting, returning home exhausted and being constantly ‘on the go’ […] The pressure of performing so many roles, of expressing so many emotions every single day, began to vex me. I became a robot – instantly donning another persona at the snap of ‘Lights, camera, action’.

“The pressure was too much. The burden began seeping into my bones; the complexities of my characters began gnawing at my soul.”

Koirala used alcohol to hide her bashful­ness in social situations. She had also embraced it as a means of defying India’s social norms.

“A woman is not supposed to smoke or drink, but a man smoking and drinking is fine, so just to be rebellious, I would smoke and drink,” she says. “Plus, I got involved in the Bombay film industry just out of school. It was intimi­dating. People were confident, they were groomed, they were successful, all glitter, and I was a small-town girl … I could barely express myself. I was very shy and introverted. At a shoot, I would pretend to be reading a book so that nobody would come over and start talking to me. When I starting drinking, I could converse and I could be confident.”

With the mounting burden of fame and the distress that came with what she calls “toxic relationships”, alcohol began taking a more significant role in her life.

“One thing led to another,” she says. “If I was heart­broken, I would pick up a glass of wine. If I wanted to celebrate, I would pick up a bottle of champagne … I got looped in.” In Healed, Koirala writes, “If I was on a diet, it would be vodka.”

By 2012, with her short marriage to Nepali businessman Samrat Dahal on the rocks, “I was not in a good space. I was emotionally broke. My body was not in the best shape,” she says. Then, in November of that year, “weak, sick and lethargic”, at the age of 42, she was diagnosed at a hospital in Kathmandu.

“At that time they were suspecting stage-three cancer, and we went to Mumbai for more tests,” Koirala says. “The doctors there said the cancer was intertwined with my other organs, and any operation was going to be very difficult and complicated.

“It seemed to me like a dead end.”

Within weeks, Koirala was operated on by specialist Dennis Chi, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, in the United States. The surgery, she says, took a gruelling 11 hours, and was followed by four months of “intensive chemo”, the first session of which she rather terrifyingly likens in Healed to “dark, wild wolves, their mouths open, fangs bared, seeking out each vein of my body, tearing forward at great speed, hell-bent on destruction”.

Within the pages of Healed – which was published in December and could best be described as part near-death-experience memoir part self-help manual – Koirala analyses her pre-diagnosis life with self-critical honesty. While pointing out that – away from the red carpet and the glossy entertain­ment magazines – a Bollywood megastar’s lot can be gruel­ling and ruinous, she does not shy away from admitting that hers was a privileged world, and that she had become “resentful” of the adulation, the riches and the security it gave her. She had, in fact, become “wretched”.

“I simply didn’t like it,” she writes. “Somewhere, in a contorted way, I began wilfully doing the wrong things. To spite myself, I chose the wrong films. I began feeding my ego.

“I insisted on being the central character, even if it was in a B-grade film. At that point, I did not even care who the director was. Getting a central role mattered more than anything else. My state of mind was toxic, my approach to life complacent and my attitude ungrateful.”

Koirala does not let herself off the hook, and while she says writing Healed was cathartic (“I needed to get it out … to clear out my subconscious, all the painful memories”), she also hints that, in the future, she might need black-and-white evidence to remind her of who she was before, what she went through and the traumatic lessons learned.

“I needed to put the whole thing in a box,” she says. “Memory is something that fades. I’ll forget what happen­ed, the extent of pain and anguish I went through.”

Watch the trailer for Lust Stories below. Warning: contains strong language.

She also hopes that her experiences might help other cancer sufferers. “More than surgery, it’s the chemo that a lot of people fear,” she says. “And it’s a very lonely journey, so I felt that in their loneliness, in their fearfulness, this book could add a certain amount of hope and companionship.”

Since 2012, Koirala has appeared in just seven films, with one more currently in production, and she says she now pays greater attention to the roles she accepts.

In Lust Stories, released last year, with international distribution rights picked up by Netflix, she plays a house­wife having an affair with her husband’s best friend. Critics have heaped praise on the film for its exploration of female sexuality, a subject largely considered taboo in Indian cinema. According to one reviewer, “Lust Stories delight­fully pushes boundaries to tell real stories about real women, who are unapologetic in their imperfections and desires.”

Women’s issues, Koirala says, are close to her heart. She campaigns for the prevention of violence against women, as well as against human trafficking, and has served as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund, which works to improve reproductive health globally. And while she is of the opinion that the Indian film industry is changing rapidly, and for the better, there is still some way to go for women; she echoes the same concerns of female actors that can be heard from Bandra to Beverly Hills.

“In India now, there is a lot of awareness about equal pay,” she says. “You hear of the amount in an actor’s pay cheque [compared with] an actress’ pay cheque, and it can be 10, 20 times more. Can you make a film without the actress? Of course not, so why is there a different pay level?”

Also last year, Koirala played Nargis Dutt, the late mother of Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt, in the biopic Sanju. The film explores his drug addiction, arrest for involvement in a series of bombings that rocked Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1993, his conviction and jailing for possession of weapons, and his comeback.

Nargis Dutt, also an actor, died of cancer in 1981, after treatment at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where Koirala was cared for.

“I was very nervous in taking this role,” Koirala says. “I wasn’t sure if I could act the part of somebody afflicted with cancer because I would have to relive that moment again, and I really didn’t want to do that.”

The film’s director, Rajkumar Hirani, one of the most celebrated filmmakers in Indian cinema, convinced her to take the job. Sanju went on to become the highest grossing Bollywood film of 2018, and the second-highest-earning Hindi film in India ever.

Nargis Dutt was 51 when she died, and while Koirala accepts that for many actresses good parts can be harder to come by after they hit 40, she is aware that she has been fortunate since returning to the fold.

“I’ve been offered some really great roles matching my age, so I don’t have to try desperately to look 20 to get work,” she says.

Life for Manisha Koirala 2.0, it seems, is increasingly about balance, and while reaching for the stars is now off her agenda, next month she and some old school friends will trek to Everest (or Sagarmatha, as the world’s tallest mountain is known in her homeland).

“That’s something I’m really kicked about,” she says. “I come from Nepal but I’ve never been trekking.”

Then there’s an independent American film from the producers behind last year’s Crazy Rich Asians (“They’ve given me a very good script” and “we’ll be shooting in Atlanta” is all Koirala will say), before she meets up with the team behind the Jaipur Literature Festival for their annual intellectual shindig of readings, discussions and debates at the British Library in London in June.

And somewhere in among those booze-free adven­tures, on a watershed date in May, it will be six years since Koirala was declared cancer-free.

“If your cancer is early stage, then they say five years and you are cured,” she says as we wrap up. “I said to my doctor, ‘But there also has to be a time for late stage. He thought for a while and said, ‘OK, 10 years.’

“So I said, ‘OK, I’ll wait then. And I’ll see you in 10 years.’”