Lisa Ray in a 2007 interview

2007-09-06 Lisa Ray, originally uploaded by thehour.

After her initial ventures in modeling and acting in films like Hanste Khelte (1994), Nethaji (1994, Tamil movie), Kasoor (2001), Takkari Donga (Telugu movie, 2002), Lisa Ray had a big break in 2002 when she bagged the role of an escort hired as a bride-to-be for a playboy millionaire in Deepa Mehta's Bollywood/Hollywood, a romantic Indian-Canadian romp. After Bollywood/Hollywood, she went on to Jafri's creation, Arrangement, an American-British co-production about arranged Indian marriages, and Kiran Merchant's Quarter Life Crisis (2006), a portrait of twenty-somethings adrift in New York's singles' scene. Then she was the star of The World Unseen (2008), a film written and directed by Shamim Sarif, based upon a novel she had written. The film is set in Cape Town, South Africa during apartheid. The film stars Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth as two Indian South African women who fall in love in a racist, sexist, and homophobic society. (Ray and Sheth star in another movie with lesbian characters, namely I Can't Think Straight, released in November 2008.)