Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, the Queen of Bollywood cinema and 1994’s Miss World, is just about the last person you’d imagine to be part of The Pink Panther 2. Yet here she is alongside Steve Martin as he yet again channels Peter Sellers’ madcap Inspector Clouseau from Blake Edwards’ earlier cinema classics.

“We’ve grown up on Steve’s work,” the green-blue-eyed beauty explains, looking elegant and chic in a black Armani pantsuit. “He’s an institution in India.”

The film, a sequel to Martin’s 2006 hit The Pink Panther, badly needed an injection of new blood. Who better to enlist than one of the world’s most beautiful women?

Bachchan is the enigmatic Sonia, one of an international group of investigators (also comprising Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina and Yuki Matsuzaki) who have been hired to track down a master thief called The Tornado. Sonia is a writer and authority on the thief, who has stolen irreplaceable artefacts and who looks set to nab the Pink Panther diamond.

“It was such a fantastic ensemble,” Bachchan says in her melodious way of speaking. “I couldn’t resist the idea of working with all these actors, who have such big careers and who have all done intense work. Yet we were coming together for a very light film, so we had to drop our inhibitions and be silly.”

Her presence will certainly help the film’s box office around the globe. “We always joke that one in six people on the planet is Indian. We’re everywhere,” she declares with glee.

Certainly, wherever Indian people live Bachchan is their cinema idol.

Even if she wasn’t famous enough beforehand, her marriage two years ago to Indian actor Abhishek Bachchan cemented her status as cinema royalty.

The Hindu ceremony may have been a private affair but it received the kind of media coverage afforded a royal wedding.

“Abhishek’s father is a legendary actor in our industry and his late grandfather was a famous poet,” she explains.

“His mother had been an actress and she used to be a member of parliament. So he belongs to a family of artists and now I’m part of the family. It’s wonderful.”

Of course, Bachchan is better husband material than her previous beau, actor Salman Khan, known as the bad boy of Indian cinema. The two-year relationship was said to be less than harmonious and once she even sported a black eye. “No one wants to believe me that I fell down the stairs,” she said at the time.

Bachchan’s beauty is not the only reason for her success. She has a strong work ethic and has starred in more than 40 films, including the Englishlanguage Bride & Prejudice, Devdas and Guru (her co-star was her husband and the film was a huge hit in India). She also understood what it would take if she wanted to expand beyond Bollywood into Englishlanguage cinema.

When The Pink Panther 2 released in America, she hit the talk show circuit.

Originally Bachchan had been studying to become an architect. After spending a year in London as the reigning Miss World, she fell into modelling and soon moved on to her current profession as an actress. “I’m working 375 days a year,” she jokes.

Her international inclinations came from her father, a marine engineer, who travelled constantly, and she gained support from her elder brother, who even produced one of her films.

“It’s up to you how you live your life,” she says. “I’m sometimes called a dreamer but I always believe you just have to be normal with your life, try to be grounded to reality and embrace it really.”

The West (Australia)

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