AISHWARYA RAI
The woman who is talking on the phone while eating dinner with her staff in a hotel room, just before a function where she has to give a speech seems very different from the freeze-frame beauty who never moves a superflous muscle in public. Aishwarya Rai has always been more than just a movie star. shw was Miss Worl in 1994, an actress by 1997 and India’s best known global face by 2003, when she was chosen to be on the Cannes film Festival jury. By 2004, she was the inspiration for the character Leela Zahir a Bollywood movie star in Hari Kunzur’s cross cultural novel Transmission and in 2007 wife of Abhishek Bachchan and daughter-in-low of the iconic Amitabh Bachchan. In a film industry that is notoriously chauvinistic she has managed to survive clique against her scathing reviews for much of her acting carrier and an obsessive interest in her rather tangled love life, to emerge as a woman who knows her own mind. Unlike Bollywood best known actresses before her she manage her own film career. Close to her mother Vrinda who often travels with her she nevertheless drives a hard bargain herself just as she did in her days as one of India’s top model. Yet despite her flawless beauty the star who comes from the closely knit Bunt community of Karnataka, has never had it easy. Although she made her film debut in Iruvar (Twins) in 1997, directed by modern-day maestro of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa her first few Hindi films were disasters that only confirmed Bollywood’s favourite cliche that models cannot act. However with characters such as the strong willed Nandini in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam 1999, the talented Mansi in subhash Ghai’s musical Taal 1999, and the devoted helpmate sujata in Mani Ratnam;s Guru 2007, modelled on Dhirubhai Ambani’s widow Kokilaben she proved she had fire in her veins, she has seemed stiff and stilted in movies that exploit her beauty but not her innate intelligence and acting ability.But Rai;s stardom has less to do with the films she has acted in and more to do with her beauty. Though the lush Devdas 2001, in which she plays Paro, Devdas childhood sweetheart who is forcibly married to a aman twice her age indifferent semi-international projects to become the perfect Indian face for international brands to pin their million-dollar ambitions on. She was also briefly an alluring candidate for Hollywood’s relentless talented machine which is perennially on the lookout for the exotic. Post Cannes Rai met with a series of men who matter in Hollywood’s from Harvey Weinstein to Robert de Niro but the failure of British Indian Director Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice 2005, cast a spanner in her plans. The film a less than joyous adaptaion of jane Austan;s Pride and prejudice did not do well commercially despite Weinstein’s support and production house Miramax’s extensive publicity campaign for her she appeared on every major US chat show, from the Late show with DavidLetterman to the oprah winfrey show in the run-up to the film. While Chadha’s film Bend it like Beckham, had a worldwide gross profit 76 Million and budget is film only 2 Million Bride and prejudice made only Rai’s role as Tilo in The Mistress of Spices a film by Chadha’s Husband Paul Mayeda Berges, did have less for her reputation globally prompting her to focus on her career in Bollywood’s instead, while doing the odd independent movie in the U.K. such as Jagmohan Mudhra’s provoked: A true Storey and a smaller role as epic. The last Weinstein company’s attempet at a roman summed up her forways into global cinema: Is there a wishier washier wimpier actor anywhere in the known universe?,
Despite being on the wrong side of thirty in an industry that worships youth Rai still finds herself being pencilled in for big movie projects and greatly in demand for advertisements. She knows her USP: Its my simple living with her in-laws and rationing her public apperances this one-time architecture student knows exactly what goes into the structuring of contemporary celebrity in an all-seeing media-driven age.
