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| Birth Name(s) : Parminder Kaur Nagra |
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Full Parminder Nagra Biography
Parminder Kaur Nagra (Punjabi: ਪਰਮਿੰਦਰ ਕੌਰ ਨਾਗਰਾ) (born October 5, 1975 in Leicester, England) is an English actress of Indian descent.
At the age of seven, Nagra suffered a burn that resulted in the scar shown in her 2002 breakout role in the internationally acclaimed film Bend It Like Beckham. While preparing a meal, a gas stove set her trousers alight. She was taken into the bathroom by an uncle and immersed in cold water. However, when the trouser fabric was removed, it took skin with it, resulting in a large scar on her right leg. The story was included into the film to explain the burn of Parminder's character (in the movie stating she was burned while making beans on toast).
In 1991, at the age of 16, Nagra took a job as an usher at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre, ostensibly to watch and learn from the local talent. Her former boss recalls her as brilliant, polite, and very sweet, but also that she was quiet, giving no hints as to her future rise to stardom.
While slowly building a reputation on British television, Nagra also dabbled in radio, with parts in, among others, radio plays written by noted author and playwright Tanika Gupta. In 1998, Nagra was part of Dancing Girls of Lahore, a radio play co-written by her future Bend It Like Beckham co-star, Shaheen Khan. In 2001, Nagra provided the voice of a Muslim girl in Arena: The Veil, a docu-drama about women who choose to wear the Muslim head scarf.
Although she was fast becoming a star on the stages of London, it was 2002's surprise blockbuster Bend It Like Beckham, Nagra’s first film, that turned her into an international celebrity almost overnight.
Bend It Like Beckham was directed by Gurinder Chadha, a British film director also of Indian descent. It starred Nagra, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Anupam Kher, Shaheen Khan, and Keira Knightley, for whom this film was also a career breakthrough.
The small-budget picture was a critical and financial success in the United Kingdom, eventually making the leap around the world and to the United States where it earned over $30 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing British comedy in U.S. history. The script, conceived by Chadha with her husband Paul Mayeda Berges and Guljit Bindra, was written especially with Nagra in mind. While initially indifferent to the game of football, Nagra found the football-centred story to be both funny and touching. She agreed to audition and eventually accepted the role.
Nagra demonstrated that an unknown Indian actress could carry a hit film. For her efforts, the actress received much critical acclaim and professional accolades. Nagra became the first woman honoured as FIFA's "International Football Personality of the Year" and garnered no fewer than nine acting award nominations from various film organizations for her performance in Bend It Like Beckham.
Not long after wrapping up shooting on Bend It, Nagra appeared in another motion picture, Miramax’s fairy tale Ella Enchanted starring Anne Hathaway and co-starring Minnie Driver, Vivica A. Fox and Cary Elwes, where she was cast in the part of Areida, friend to Hathaway's title character Ella. In addition, Nagra took on two notable television roles for Channel 4—as Viola/Cesario in a multicultural version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and as Heere Sharma in the two-part Anglo-Indian drama Second Generation, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Jon Sen and was loosely based on the Bard’s King Lear and starred Bollywood legend Om Puri.
Although Second Generation was a ratings flop, it was a huge critical success, earning a place in The Observer newspaper's top 10 British TV programmes of 2003. It garnered Nagra a prestigious Ethnic Multicultural Media Academy (EMMA) Award for her turn as a sexually liberated and independent-minded young Anglo-Indian woman. For the role, Nagra had to muster up the courage to do some of the steamy and passionate love scenes that she had vowed not to do as an actress. The role allowed Nagra her first opportunity to visit her ancestral homeland of India when cast members traveled to Calcutta to shoot the drama’s final scenes.
While on a promotional junket in Los Angeles for Bend It, Nagra was informed by her agent that ER producer John Wells was interested in meeting with her. In fact, Bend It director Gurinder Chadha claimed during a 2007 episode of BBC's Movie Connections that this meeting was her doing, because she had recommended Parminder for the role of the new Indian character in ER during a conversation with her friend Wells.
Nagra made her first ER appearance as County General Hospital medical intern Neela Rasgotra on September 25, 2003, in season 10's premiere episode entitled, "Now What?". This was the first recurring Indian doctor role on American television. Wells adapted the character to suit Nagra, who was allowed to "keep" her own English accent in portraying the Yale-educated Indian-Anglo Neela. Nagra would go on to appear in 21 of the season’s 22 episodes, including "NICU" and "The Student," episodes in which her character was a central player. Noah Wyle, on announcing his departure from the series, described Nagra as "the future" of ER, and the media has concurred, anointing her as one of the show's "golden girls".
Parminder Nagra was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctors of Letters by the University of Leicester on 11 July 2007. |
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