Lisa Ray’s Bollywood: ‘almost like a guilty pleasure’

When actress and cancer survivor Lisa Ray, 39, was a young girl growing up in Etobicoke, Ont., her Bengalese dad would take her every weekend to an Indian grocer in Rexdale to pick up the ingredients for a traditional South Asian feast. There, Ray and her mother would peruse the shelves stocked-to-overflowing with the gaudily packaged Bollywood films that were an intriguing mystery to the Toronto-born girl and her Polish mother.
The women of the Ray household started renting the flicks –that her father disliked, but her mother, who couldn’t understand a word of Hindi, was entranced by, primarily because of the sheer spectacle of song, dance and pageantry. Ten years later, at the tender age of 16, Ray found herself in Bombay (now Mumbai), where she fast became one of India’s most sought-after models. Soon, the offers from Bollywood poured in. But she was hesitant about a career in an industry that seemed to an Indo-Canadian girl – particularly then – so kitschy. Eventually, the brunette beauty capitulated, appearing in 2001’s Kasoor. Soon afterwards, however, exhausted from the noise and frenetic pace of India, the actress moved back to Canada to focus on art-house-film roles. Ironically, it was her turn in Kasoor that caught filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s eye, and Ray’s first starring role back in her native country was Mehta’s spoof Bollywood Hollywood, followed by her poignant performance in the same director’s Oscar-nominated Water.
As the International Indian Film Academy Awards come to Toronto this weekend, Ray reflects on the magic and mayhem of the industry in her own words.
MOM AND BOLLYWOOD AND ME
When I was a kid, we’d rent Bollywood movies, and my mom and I would watch them. My dad didn’t bother because he was very disdainful of them for many different reasons. He grew up in the Bengali community, which considers itself to be the intellectuals, the visionaries of India, regardless of whether that’s true or not. Bengal also produced the great, serious filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who is considered one of the masters in India.
But my mom and I would watch the movies for the action, more than the storylines, which are more or less interchangeable. We had our favourite actors and actresses. I certainly never aspired to be a part of Bollywood films. To my eye and taste, the actual storylines and the quality of production are not that impressive. The appeal to me was simply the songs, dancers and costumes.
MOVIES ‘KIND OF LIKE FAST FOOD’
I was just in a play for Luminato called Taj, with the Indian actor Kabir Bedi, a very renowned, very worldly and wise Indian actor. We were rehearsing the play in Mississauga, in a complex that was quite close to a couple of Indian grocery stores. One day, we were walking to lunch and Kabir saw in the shop windows, dahl, rice and Bollywood films, a slew of them. And he giggled and said to me, “My God, when you’re making a Bollywood film, you’re consumed by the sheer amount of effort involved – you’re shooting when it’s too hot, cold, dusty, dirty and chaotic. You go through all that, and here your final product is probably given away free with a sack of dahl.” We chuckled together because Bollywood films are kind of like fast food. They’re easy, quick consumption.