Prakash Raj studied in St.Joseph's High School in Bangalore. He won the President's Scout award in 1982.

Prakash Rai began his acting career with Kannada DoorDarshan serials like Bisilu Kudure and Guddada Bhootha.

He acted in back-to-back stage shows for ₹300 a month in the initial stages of his career when he joined Kalakshetra, Bengaluru, and he has 2,000 street theatre performances to his credit.

Apart from his mother tongue Kannada, Prakash's fluency in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Hindi and English has placed him among the most sought after actors in Indian cinema.

He has played a variety of roles, most notably as the antagonist and, of late, as a character actor.

Prakash Rai is a very famous actor in South India for a wide variety of roles he has performed, most notably as a villain and of late, as a character artiste, in Tamil and Telugu.

He has made commercially successful films such as Dhaya, Poi and Naanu Nanna Kanasu.

Prakash Raj turned director with the Kannada film Naanu Nanna Kanasu in 2010. He is currently directing a Tamil-Telugu bilingual film Dhoni.

He has slowly been gaining ground in Bollywood too, with super hit films like Salman Khan starrer Wanted, Amitabh Bachchan starrer Bbuddha Hoga Tera Baap and Ajay Devgn starrer Singham, where he played important villainous roles.

He has more Hindi films in his kitty with the highly anticipated film Dabangg 2 about to be released and the modern remake of the film Himmatwalla.

Prakash, as an actor has won aNational Film Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1998 for Mani Ratnam's Iruvar and a National Film Award for Best Actor in 2009 for his role in Kanchivaram, a Tamil film directed by Priyadarshan,[7] and as a producer has won a National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Kannada for Puttakkana Highway directed by his long-time theatre friend B. Suresh in 2011.