Guru Dutt was born on 9 July 1925, in Padukone in the present-day state of Karnataka in India into a Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmin family. He was originally named Vasanth Kumar Shivashankar Padukone but this was changed to Guru Dutt following a childhood accident, the belief being that it was an auspicious choice. His parents were originally settled in Karwar but relocated. Dutt spent his early childhood in Bhowanipore, Kolkata. He spoke fluent Bengali. His sister Lalita Lajmi is a famous Indian painter. His niece Kalpana Lajmi was also a well known Indian film director, producer and screenwriter.

Dutt wired home to say he had got the job of a telephone operator at a Lever Brothers factory in Calcutta. But soon he got disenchanted by the job and left it. He later joined his parents in Bombay in 1944.

However, his uncle found him a job under a three-year contract with the Prabhat Film Company in Pune in 1944. This once premier film producing centre had already seen the departure of its best talent, V. Shantaram, who had by then launched his own production company called Rajkamal Kala Mandir. It was at Prabhat Film Company that Dutt met two people who would remain his good friends for life – actors Rehman and Dev Anand.

Dutt acted in a small role as Sri Krishna in Chand in 1944. In 1945, he acted as well as assisted director Vishram Bedekar in Lakhrani, and in 1946 he worked as an assistant director and choreographed dances for P. L. Santoshi’s film, Hum Ek Hain.

This contract ended in 1947, but Dutt’s mother got him a job as a freelance assistant with Baburao Pai, the CEO of the Prabhat Film Company and Studio. However, after that, for almost ten months, he was unemployed and stayed with his family at Matunga in Bombay. During this time, Dutt developed a flair for writing in English, and wrote short stories for The Illustrated Weekly of India, a local weekly English magazine.

While Dutt was hired by Prabhat Film Company as a choreographer, he was pressed into service as an actor, and even as an assistant director. After Prabhat failed in 1947, Dutt moved to Bombay, where he worked with two leading directors of the time, with Amiya Chakravarty in Girls’ School, and with Gyan Mukherjee in the Bombay Talkies film Sangram. Then, Dev Anand offered him a job as a director in his new company, Navketan, after the first movie had flopped.

Dutt’s first film, Navketan’s Baazi, was released in 1951. It was a tribute to the 1940s film noir genre of Hollywood with the morally ambiguous hero, the transgressing siren, and shadow lighting.

In 1953, Dutt married Geeta Roy Chaudhary, later Geeta Dutt, a well-known playback singer. They had been engaged for three years and had to overcome a great deal of family opposition to marry. They had three children, Tarun, Arun and Nina, who grew up in the homes of Dutt’s brother Atma Ram and Geeta Dutt’s brother Mukul Roy after their parents died.

Fortune smiled on Dutt’s next film, the 1954 blockbuster Aar Paar. This was followed by the 1955 hit, Mr. & Mrs. ’55, then C.I.D., Sailaab and in 1957, Pyaasa – the story of a poet, rejected by an uncaring world, who achieves success only after his apparent death. Dutt played the lead role in three of these five films.

His 1959 Kaagaz Ke Phool was an intense disappointment. He had invested a great deal of love, money, and energy in this film, which was a self-absorbed tale of a famous director (played by Guru Dutt) who falls in love with an actress (played by Waheeda Rehman, Dutt’s real-life love interest). Kaagaz Ke Phool failed at the box office and Dutt was devastated. All subsequent films from his studio were, thereafter, officially headed by other directors since Dutt felt that his name was anathema to the box office.

In 1964, Dutt acted in his last film Sanjh Aur Savera, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee, opposite Meena Kumari. Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi was the last film he was working on at the time of his death. He was replaced as the lead by Dharmendra and the film released in 1966 as his team’s last production.

On 10 October 1964, Dutt was found dead in his bed in his rented apartment at Pedder Road in Bombay. He is said to have been mixing alcohol and sleeping pills. His death may have been suicide, or just an accidental overdose. It would have been his third suicide attempt.

Dutt had an unhappy marital life. According to his brother Atmaram, he was “a strict disciplinarian as far as work was concerned, but totally undisciplined in his personal life”. He smoked and drank heavily and kept odd hours. Dutt’s relationship with actress Waheeda Rehman also worked against their marriage. At the time of his death, he had separated from Geeta and was living alone. Geeta Dutt died in 1972 at age 41, after excessive drinking, which resulted in liver damage.

In the 2002 Sight & Sound critics’ and directors’ poll, two of his films, Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool, were among the top 160 greatest films of all time. The same 2002 Sight & Sound poll ranked Dutt at No. 73 in its list of all-time greatest directors, thus making him the eighth-highest-ranked Asian filmmaker in the poll.

A postage stamp featuring Dutt was released by India Post on 11 October 2004.

A Doordarshan documentary on Dutt aired on 10 October 2011.