Flick through this month’s Indian edition of Vogue or any one of the country’s gossipy tabloids and you will see one face pictured again and again that of Bollywood’s newest megastar: a 24-year-old from the London borough of Barnet.
The profile belongs to Katrina Kaif, who watched her first Bollywood film at the age of 16 on Channel 4. Rejected as a teenager by modeling agencies in London for not being skinny enough, she has the £1 billion-a-year Hindi cinema industry at her feet.
The trajectory of her career has been extraordinary even by Bollywood’s hyperbolic standards. She arrived in India aged 17, speaking not a word of Hindi or knowing how to dance — two prerequisites of Indian cinema. Today, with 15 films to her credit, she is India’s most searched-for celebrity, according to Google; the country’s sexiest woman, according to the lads’ magazines FHM and Maxim; and the sub-continent’s most bankable female lead, according to the past year’s box-office receipts.
Her A-list status was confirmed earlier this year when Mattel, the toymaker, said that a forthcoming Bollywood Barbie doll would be modeled on Miss Kaif — not bad for a former wannabe model who couldn’t get a break in waif-obsessed Britain.
Assured of being mobbed if she appears in public in India, she cherishes her relative anonymity in Britain and speaks fondly about being able to stroll down Finchley High Street unmolested during her frequent but secret visits to her childhood home. “My London childhood and my career are two very different things,” she said. “I don’t like people to make the connection. The little bits you’ll read on the internet here and there about my London roots, they are the limits of what I’m willing to divulge.”
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