Indo-Canadian actress Lisa Ray

Lisa Ray (born April 4, 1972) is an Indo-Canadian actress and former fashion model.

Early life
Ray was born to an Bengali Indian father and a Polish mother and grew up in the suburb of Etobicoke, Toronto. 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. She spoke Polish to her maternal grandmother and watched movies with Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray with her cinephile dad. Ray was spotted by an agent in a crowd during a family vacation in India when she was 16, when she began modelling.

Career
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.

After turning down a number of roles, she began her acting career with the Bollywood film Kasoor in 2001 opposite Aftab Shivdasani where her voice was subsequently dubbed by Divya Dutta as she could not speak Hindi. 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.

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, 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).