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Lisa Ray(Hindi, Tamil,Kannada, Telugu)
April 4, 1974
Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Occupation: Actor, Model; Years active: 2001 – present;
Early life
Ray was born to an Bengali Indian father and a Polish mother and grew up in the suburb of Etobicoke, Toronto.[1] She excelled academically, doing five years of high school in four, while attending three different high schools: Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, Richview Collegiate Institute and Silverthorn Collegiate Institute.[2] She spoke Polish to her maternal grandmother and watched movies with Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray with her cinephile dad.[1] Ray was spotted by an agent in a crowd during a family vacation in India when she was 16, when she began modelling.[1]
Career
Ray first came to the public attention when she appeared in an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing wearing a high-cut black swimsuit[3] opposite Karan Kapoor.[4] Subsequently, she returned to Canada to attend university to study journalism, but a car injury which injured her mother derailed those plans. Instead, she returned to India where she appeared on the cover of Glad Rags wearing a red Baywatch-style swimsuit. The sensation that caused led to more magazine covers, spokesperson deals and a job as host of her own show-business program. A Times of India poll named her the "ninth most beautiful woman of the millennium", the only model in the top ten.[2]
She first made her cinematic debut in 1994 in a Tamil movie opposite actor Sarath Kumar in the film Nethaji where she appeared in a brief role. It went unnoticed. After turning down a number of roles,[5] she began her Bollywood acting career with the film Kasoor in 2001 opposite Aftab Shivdasani[4] where her voice was subsequently dubbed by Divya Dutta as she could not speak Hindi.[6] Her work in that film caught the eye of Deepa Mehta who cast Ray in the romantic Indian-Canadian romp, Bollywood/Hollywood in 2002.[1] In 2005, she worked again with Mehta in the Oscar-nominated film, Water where she did speak her own lines in Hindi; eventually though her voice was dubbed.[6] Since breaking through she has worked in productions from Canada, Europe and the United states.
Recent roles include a farm girl in All Hat, a school teacher in A Stone's Throw and a housewife in 50's apartheid South Africa in The World Unseen.
In 2007, she completed filming for Kill Kill Faster Faster, which is a contemporary film noir inspired by the critically acclaimed novel of the same name by Joel Rose. She appeared nude in the movie and in a few uninhibited sex scenes, something which no mainstream actress of Indian origin had done before.[7]
She appeared in the famous song "Afreeen Afreen" by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in 1996.
Awards
She was voted Star of the Future at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival,[8] Top Ten most Beautiful Indian Woman of the Millenium by the Times of India and won the Best Actress in a Canadian film for Water by the Vancouver Critics Circle (ref: imdb.com, Glow magazine, December 2007).
Filmography
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1994 | Hanste Khelte | Rekha | |
| 1994 | Nethaji | Priya | Tamil movie |
| 2001 | Kasoor | Simran Bhargav | |
| 2002 | Bollywood/Hollywood | Sue (Sunita) Singh | |
| 2002 | "Takkari Donga" | Bhuvana | |
| 2005 | Water | Kalyani | |
| Seeking Fear | Kalyani | ||
| 2006 | Quarter Life Crisis | Angel | |
| 2007 | I Can't Think Straight | Tala | |
| 2007 | The World Unseen | Miriam | |
| 2008 | Kill Kill Faster Faster | Fleur |
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