Lisa Ray

Biography

Lisa Ray was born on April 4, 1972 in Toronto, Canada. She is a Canadian actress and former fashion model.

After she graduated from high-school she decided that she wants to be a famous journalist but in the end she renounced after she became a model for a fashion Canadian magazine and appeared on the cover at the age of sixteen.

As a model she made a lot of commercials for many Indian companies and from 2001 she decided to start an acting career.

Lisa Ray first came to the public attention when she appeared in an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing wearing a high-cut black swimsuit opposite Karan Kapoor. 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.

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, she began her Bollywood acting career with the film Kasoor in 2001 opposite Aftab Shivdasani 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. 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.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.

2009 saw Ray play a Christian-Arab lesbian in the humorously entitled "I Can't Think Straight" directed by Shamim Sarif.

She appeared in the famous song "Afreen Afreen" by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in 1996.