He was later associated with the group of political and social workers that included Lala Lajpat Rai and Bhagat Singh, before moving into a career in films in 1928.
[4][3] Hiralal took to acting in films "as a hobby" after being asked by filmmaker Abdur Rashid Kardar, who was making Safdar Jung in Lahore, to play the role of a Pathan.
He then appeared in Sipahi (1941), playing "a soldier who fights for his country (in World War I) and then under the economic depression that follows is unable to find a job.
Hiralal recollected in an interview in the 1960s that it was with his role in Faisla (1947) opposite Kanan Devi that he was "able to form a certain concept of villainy which served me well later when I began to play the villain in most of my pictures."
In Chunder's Teen Bhai (1955), he "played a villain" opposite Pahari Sanyal, Nazir Hussain and Bharat Bhushan's characters.
Hiralal credited filmmakers Birendranath Sircar and Hemachandra Chunder for having taught him to become a character actor, Roop K. Shorey for the "laugh" and "weep without sobbing" in films.
[7] Hiralal was born into a Punjabi family on 14 March 1909 (or 1910) in Lahore, then a city in the Punjab Province of British India (in present-day Pakistan).
The sons were Krishna, Kamal, Prem, Ajay, and Inder, the latter of whom was an actor and model, and died in the Air India Flight 182 bombing in 1985.