Parminder Nagra

Infobox actor


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name = Parminder Nagra
birthname = Parminder Kaur Nagra
birthdate = birth date and age|1975|10|5
location = Leicester, England
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height = 5 ft 1
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homepage =
notable role = Jesminder Bhamra in "Bend It Like Beckham"
Dr. Neela Rasgotra in "ER"
academyawards =
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Parminder Kaur Nagra D.Litt. ( _pa. ਪਰਮਿੰਦਰ ਕੌਰ ਨਾਗਰਾ) (born October 5, 1975 in Leicester, England) is an English actress of Indian descent.

Biography

Early life

Nagra was born to Sikh parents who emigrated to the UK from the Punjab region of northern India in the late 1960s. She is affectionately known as "Mindi". Her middle name, Kaur, meaning Princess, is traditionally given to Sikh women (Sikh men traditionally have the middle name Singh, which in Punjabi translates to Lion.). Her family background was working class. Her father, Sukha, a factory worker, is believed to have separated from her mother, Nashuter, a packer in a factory, when Parminder was a child.Fact|date=September 2008 Parminder, her two younger brothers, and her younger sister were raised in a small terraced house in the Belgrave district of Leicester by her mother and stepfather, who worked as a bookkeeper at a cousin's transport company.

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).

Nagra attended Northfield House Primary School in Leicester. At her comprehensive school, Soar Valley College she played viola in the youth orchestra and also appeared in her first theatrical productions.

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 bossWho|date=September 2008 recalls her as brilliant, polite, and very sweet, but also that she was quiet, giving no hints as to her future rise to stardom.Fact|date=September 2008

"Falling into acting"

Not long after leaving school, and only a few months after sitting her A-levels, Nagra was approached by Jez Simons, her former drama instructor, about becoming part of Hathi Productions, a leading Leicester-based British Indian theatre company, for which he served as the artistic director. She accepted and was cast as a chorus member in the 1994 musical "Nimai" presented at the Leicester Haymarket. Only a week into rehearsals, she was plucked from the chorus to take the place of the lead actress who had dropped out. Simons recalls that Nagra, while a good singer and actress, had an intangible quality that raised her above other actresses and that led him to select her as the new lead. Nagra sometimes describes herself as having "fallen into"Fact|date=September 2008 acting due to this unexpected turn of events.

The London years

Before she turned twenty, Nagra left Leicester for London, forgoing university to pursue a theatrical career and her childhood dreams of becoming an actress. After selling her prized violaFact|date=September 2008, she found herself living alone in Peckham, south London, employed in a stocktaking job and struggling to find theatrical work.

Nagra's first London theatrical job came in 1994Fact|date=September 2008 when she was cast as the Princess in "Sleeping Beauty", a Christmas-time pantomime production at the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Although most criticsWho|date=September 2008 seemed rather unimpressed with the show, Nagra's performance is notable in that she was a woman of colour portraying a traditionally white character.Fact|date=September 2008

After "Sleeping Beauty", Nagra worked with small Indian theatre companies such as Tara Arts and Tamasha. The roles marked the first of many early career opportunities in theatre that led eventually to the radio and television appearances that also defined her career throughout most of the 1990s.

In 1996, Nagra took a small part in "Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards", written by Chikamatsu Monzaemon and performed at Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre. It was there that she met Irish actor Kieran Creggan, with whom she later moved into a flat in Kennington, south London. Their relationship continued for five years.Fact|date=September 2008

Although lacking formal theatrical training, Nagra signed with veteran London-based agent Joan Brown, after which she began to land her first television roles — a bit part on the British medical drama "Casualty", where she played a girl attacked with a broken bottle, and a small role in the television movie "King Girl" in which Nagra portrayed an abusive member of a girls' gang.

In 1997, Nagra appeared in the three-part drama "Turning World", starring Roshan Seth. The following year she appeared on "Casualty" for the second time.

The year 1999 saw her playing the part of a convenience store clerk in the television movie "Donovan Quick," starring Colin Firth. Also of note are appearances on the British comedy shows "Goodness Gracious Me" and "The Kumars at No. 42".

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 Nagra had cut her teeth in television and, to a lesser extent, in radio, her stage performances are perhaps the most noteworthy element in her corpus of work during her London years. Not long after "Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards", Nagra was cast in 1997's "Oh Sweet Sita", an adaptation of Indian mythology about Rama and his dutiful wife Sita.

Starring in the title role of Sita, Nagra caught the attention of director Gurinder Chadha, who would later write the script for "Bend It Like Beckham" with Nagra in mind for the lead role. Although Chadha was charmed by NagraFact|date=September 2008, it would be five more years before the spectacular results of their collaboration would materialize.

Nagra's other notable stage roles during this period are many and include appearances in "Skeleton" (1997), with critical acclaim for her "bright-eyed vivacity"Fact|date=September 2008 as the village girl; "A Tainted Dawn" (1997), playing a Hindu "boy" accidentally left in Pakistan and raised by a Muslim couple; "Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings & A Funeral" (1998), showing her skills as a romantic comedienne, also to critical acclaim; "Krishna's Lila — A Play of the Asian World" (1999), as part of a five-person cast in a controversially titled piece; "The Square Circle" (1999), tackling the demanding role of an illiterate peasant girl who becomes a rape victim; and in "River on Fire" (2000), as Kiran, in a retelling of Sophocles' "Antigone".

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"

"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. The script, conceived by Chadha with her husband Paul Mayeda Berges and Guljit Bindra, was written especially with Nagra in mind.Fact|date=September 2008 While initially indifferent to the game of football, Nagra found the football-centred story to be both funny and touching.Fact|date=September 2008 She agreed to audition and eventually accepted the role.

In the film, Nagra plays Jesminder (Jess) Bhamra, a teenage Sikh football player who idolizes football superstar David Beckham and defies her traditional parents to pursue her dreams of playing football. The rough parallels to Nagra's (and Chadha's) own personal story are apparent.Or|date=September 2008 However, pulling off the role was no small feat considering that the then-26-year-old actress had never played football and was portraying a character nearly a decade younger than she was. An intensive ten-week training course of the game "futsal", led by noted coach Simon Clifford, put Nagra through rigorous nine-hour-a-day workouts.Fact|date=September 2008 The hard work paid off as Nagra learned to "bend" or curve the ball in flight, as she did in one particularly memorable backyard scene. In a nod to Nagra's actual life, director Chadha wrote and incorporated a scene about Nagra's scar into the film.

Nagra demonstrated that an unknown Indian actress could carry a hit film.Or|date=September 2008 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"Fact|date=September 2008 and garnered no fewer than nine acting award nominations from various film organizations for her performance in "Bend It Like Beckham".

In 2002, she was awarded the Golden Wave Award at the Bordeaux International Festival of Women in Cinema for "best actress" and later earned a Movieline Young Hollywood Award for "best breakthrough performance."

Beyond "Bend It"

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 [http://www.steami.com/girls/when-er-star-parminder-nagra-dropped-her-clothes/ love scenes] that she had vowed not to do as an actress.Fact|date=September 2008 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.

Hollywood

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.Fact|date=May 2008 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.Fact|date=May 2008

At their initial meeting, Wells made Nagra an offer to join the ensemble cast; she accepted immediately. In recalling the moment, she said, "I had to sit still and act professional, while all the time I just wanted to jump up and run around the room screaming".Fact|date=September 2008 Not long after the meeting, Nagra signed a one-year contract that included an option for three additional years. Despite her new status, Nagra said, "I don't think Hollywood has changed me at all. The first thing I did when I arrived was buy chapati flour and lentils".Fact|date=May 2008

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 one of the first recurring Indian doctor roles on American televisionFact|date=May 2008 (Kavi Raz was a regular cast member on "St. Elsewhere"). Wells adapted the character to suit Nagra, who was allowed to "keep" her own English accent in portraying the Yale-educated Anglo-Indian 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" [cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/news/wenn/2004-09-13 |title=Movie & TV News 13 September 2004 |accessdate=2008-05-08 |format= |work=The Internet Movie Database ] of "ER," and the media has concurred, anointing her as one of the show's "golden girls".

Nagra continues to garner professional accolades and honors. In 2004, she received a Teen Choice Award nomination for her work on "ER" and also had the honor of being a torch bearer as the Olympic torch passed through London on its way to the Games in Athens. [cite web |url=http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/athens/news/2004-06-26-torch-london_x.htm |title=Olympic torch travels through London |accessdate=2008-05-08 |format= |work=USA Today ] In 2005 she took home an Outstanding Achievement in Acting Award from the South Asian Students' Alliance. Later in the year, Nagra finished filming season 11 of "ER" and returned to her native Leicester to work on director Amit Gupta's "Love in Little India" [cite web |url=http://www.parkentertainment.com/projects%20in%20development.htm |title=Projects in Development |accessdate=2008-05-08 |work=Park enterntainment] in which she was cast as the female lead.

She was nominated for a 2006 Asian Excellence Award, in the category of Outstanding Female Television Performance, for her work in "ER". She went on to win the award the following year. [cite web |url=http://www.azntv.com/axawards/night_of_excellence/winners.aspx |title=Winners |accessdate=2008-05-08 |work=AZN Television - Asian Excellence Awards]

Parminder Nagra was awarded the Honorary Degree of Doctors of Letters by the University of Leicester on 11 July 2007. [cite web|url=http://www2.le.ac.uk/ebulletin/people/honours-and-awards/2000-2009/2007/07/nparticle.2007-07-03.4947985110/?searchterm=Parminder%20Nagra|title=ER Star Receives University of Leicester Honour|accessdate=2008-10-09]

Parminder Nagra has recently been cast in the next DC animated movie, '. The project is produced by Bruce Timm, who produced the Emmy-Award winning '. Nagra will be acting alongside Batman legend Kevin Conroy, who has been voicing Batman for over 15 years. The film will be rated PG-13 like its predecessors, "Superman Doomsday" and "".

With the departure of Maura Tierney ,Nagra is now the leading lady of ER

References

External links

*imdb name|id=0619406|name=Parminder Nagra
* [http://www.nbc.com/ER/ NBC's ER website]
* [http://www.parmindernagraonline.com/ Parminder Nagra Online (fansite)]
* [http://www.thisisleicestershire.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=132935&command=displayContent&sourceNode=132702&contentPK=17809033&folderPk=77465&pNodeId=132393 Interview in the Leicester Mercury]