Who won the Best Leading Role (Female) at IIFA 2025?

Concept: The IIFA (International Indian Film Academy) Awards judge screen acting in two separate tiers — Performance in a Leading Role, for the actor who carries the film’s central narrative, and Performance in a Supporting Role. Each edition also honours the previous calendar year’s Indian theatrical releases, not the releases of the year in which the ceremony is held. A "who won at IIFA <year>" question is therefore settled by fixing both coordinates: the release slate that edition covers, and the acting tier named in the stem.

Application: IIFA 2025 was the silver-jubilee 25th edition, held in Jaipur on 8–9 March 2025, and it honoured the 2024 Indian release slate. In the Performance in a Leading Role (Female) category the award went to Nitanshi Goel, for playing Phool Kumari in Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies — the film that also took Best Picture and Best Direction at the same edition.

Cross-check — why the other names belong to different categories:

• Janki Bodiwala was honoured at that very edition, but in the Supporting Role (Female) tier for Shaitaan — the supporting tier, not the leading tier the stem asks about.

• Pratibha Ranta was recognised at the same edition in the Debut (Female) category for the same film, Laapataa Ladies — again a different category from the leading-role one.

• Alia Bhatt was a leading-role nominee that year for Jigra, but the category was not awarded to her.

Fixing both coordinates — the 2024 release slate and the leading-role tier — the Best Leading Role (Female) honour at IIFA 2025 belongs to Nitanshi Goel.