Patten's daughter tastes stardom in Bollywood By Amit Roy (Filed: 07/01/2006)
Alice Patten, daughter of Lord Patten, Chancellor of Oxford University and former governor of Hong Kong, is about to appear in a Bollywood blockbuster.
The 26-year-old had to learn Hindi lines and appears in two dance sequences in Rang de Basanti (Paint it Yellow), starring Aamir Khan.
"It was an amazing experience," she said yesterday of her five months shooting in Delhi, Amritsar and Jaipur.
"I play a documentary film-maker in London who is left a diary by her grandfather who had served in the Indian police force before independence."
Her character travels to India to make a documentary based on the diary.
"It's my first film," added Patten, who makes her West End debut, as Ophelia in Hamlet, at the New Ambassador's Theatre next month.
The other leading lady in the film, released worldwide on Jan 20, is Soha Ali Khan, whose father will be known to cricket lovers as the Nawab of Pataudi, the Winchester College-educated prince who captained both Oxford and India.
Bollywood has developed something of a love affair with English rose actresses in recent years.
The Oscar-nominated Lagaan, set in the time of the Raj, included 20 British actors in the cast, among them the female lead, Rachel Shelley.
Another cast member, Chris England, was moved to write an affectionate tribute to India, From Balham to Bollywood, after making the film.
Last year, Antonia Bernath, a blonde, blue-eyed beauty of 23, was fetched out of drama school for the lead role in Subhash Ghai's Kisna: The Warrior Poet, set around the time of independence.
Indian critics, a much nastier lot than their counterparts in Britain, trashed the film but raved about the English actress.
The Rising, released last year and dealing with events leading to the uprising of 1857, achieved only moderate success but Toby Stephens, son of Dame Maggie Smith, was much praised for his role as a British army officer who befriends an Indian rebel.
Last year also saw Sophie Dahl appear in a potboiler, The King of Bollywood, while Saffron Burrows has just finished filming an Indian thriller, The Thread.