Lisa Ray

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Lisa Rani Ray (born 4 April 1972) is an Indian Canadian actor, author, columnist, model, performer, philanthropist, social activist, television and theater personality.

Ray begun her modelling career in the early 1990s, appearing for leading Indian brands like Bombay Dyeing and Lakmé.

Alongside, she made her acting debut in 1996 in the Tamil film Nethaji.

Her first Bollywood appearance was in 2001, in the offbeat romantic thriller Kasoor.

Through her acting career, Ray has demonstrated a penchant for issue-oriented portrayals, most notably in the 2005 Oscar nominated Canadian film Water and the award-winning South African feature The World Unseen, described by a reviewer as "one of the best-conceived queer films of the past year."In 2009, Ray was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable form of blood cancer.

She began writing The Yellow Diaries, a blog about her experiences in living with cancer.

Her writing and columns have since regularly appeared in multiple major publications.

Ray remains an active advocate of stem-cell therapy and has participated in several successful fundraisers and cancer awareness campaigns. In 2011, Ray began hosting a popular travel show on Discovery Channel India alongside appearing as host and judge in Food Network's highest rated show, Top Chef Canada.In 2016, Ray opened an Instagram account dedicated to poetry In March 2019, Ray participated as a panelist on the 2019 edition of Canada Reads where she advocated for David Chariandy's award winning second novel, Brother.In May 2019, Ray’s first book, the memoir Close To The Bone, was published by Harper-Collins India.

In October 2019, Ray signed up to write three more books with her publisher Harper-Collins.In 2020, Ray will be seen in the highly anticipated musical 99 songs, written and produced by A. R. Rahman.

She is also slated to reappear in season 2 of Amazon Prime Video web series Four More Shots Please!

Early life

Ray was born in Toronto to a Bengali father and a Polish mother and grew up in the suburb of Etobicoke. She spoke Polish with her maternal grandmother and watched movies of Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray with her cinephile dad. During her childhood she spent some time in Calcutta.

She excelled academically, doing five years of high school in four, while attending three different high schools: Etobicoke Collegiate Institute, Richview Collegiate Institute and Silverthorn Collegiate Institute.

Personal life

On 23 June 2009, Ray was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells known as plasma cells, which produce antibodies. It is a rare disease. In April 2010, she announced that she was cancer-free, after an autologous stem cell transplant using her own stem cells. As multiple myeloma is an incurable disease, Ray is not completely cured of the disease.

In February 2012, Ray announced her engagement to management consultant Jason Dehni. On 20 October 2012, Ray and Dehni (then a banking executive) were married in California's Napa Valley.

In September 2018, Ray announced that she and her husband became parents to twin daughters Sufi and Soleil via surrogacy, in June 2018.

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Modelling, film and television career

Ray's modeling career began when she was "discovered" during a family holiday in India while still in her teens. Ray's first glimpse of public attention was provided by an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing, where she appeared in a black swimsuit opposite Karan Kapoor. A subsequent meeting with Maureen Wadia, editor of Indian fashion publication Gladrags, resulted in an iconic swimsuit cover that has catapulted Ray to national prominence in India. "The majority of my most enjoyable professional moments occurred to me by serendipity," Ray later wrote.

By the time the Gladrags' cover broke, Ray was back in Toronto, ready to start university. Following a tragic auto accident that would force her mother to a wheelchair for the remainder of her life, her plans were foiled. Ray returned to India and went on to become one of the country's first supermodels, as well as the face of Lakmé and Bombay Dyeing. Ray will later acknowledge that this coincident of career ascension and personal tragedy as a recurring theme in her life. In Femina in 2016, she wrote, "I have come to find that every major turning point in my life is preceded by pain."

Ray will now lend her face to well-known international companies such as L'Oréal, MasterCard, De Beers, and Rado as one of India's most popular cover models. "The most beautiful woman of the millennium," a Times of India survey named her as the "ninth most beautiful woman of the millennium," the only model in the top ten. She co-anchored the TV show Star Biz on Star Movies and appeared in a music video for Afreen Afreen Afreen, a renowned lyricist written by renowned lyricist Javed Akhtar, and directed and performed by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Ray made her Indian Film Industry debut in 2001 with the Hindi film Kasoor opposite Aftab Shivdasani, in which her voice was dubbed by Divya Dutta because she could not speak Hindi. Despite this, her appearance earned praise. Deepa Mehta, who appeared in the romantic Indian-Canadian romp Bollywood/Hollywood in 2002, was also caught her attention in the film.

Ray moved to London to concentrate on a career in the performing arts after realizing that acting was something she wanted to pursue more seriously. Ray attended the Central School of Speech and Drama, the London Centre for Theatre Studies, Desmond Jones School of Physical Theatre, and BADA. She obtained her degree in acting from the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts (ALRA), in 2004. Ray made a conscious decision not to accept any film offers until she had finished school. However, she got another call from Deepa Mehta, who made her an appointment she could not refuse—the lead role of Kalyani in Mehta's much-anticipated, yet still controversial feature, Water. Lisa sang her lines in Hindi in the film, but her voice was dubbed in the final cut. Water came as a winner at both national and international critical acclaim in 2005, with Roger Ebert describing it as "lovefully in the way Satyajit Ray's films are gorgeous."

Ray has been involved in productions from Canada, Europe, and the United States. In The World Unseen, a farm girl, a school teacher in A Stone's Throw, and a housewife in 1950s-apartheid South Africa are among their former roles. Ray appeared in the Shamim Sarif-directed British romantic comedy I Can't Think Straight, which went on to win awards at national queer film festivals, including Dallas OUT TAKES, Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

Ray based herself out of Milan, Paris, and New York from 2004 to 2008, moving to Toronto after her mother's death in late 2008. Ray completed filming for Kill Kill Faster Faster, a contemporary film noir influenced by Joel Rose's critically acclaimed book of the same name. She appeared in the Woody Harrelson starrer Canadian-American superhero film Defendor in a 2009 episode of the USA Network series Psych, as well as in the Woody Harrelson-American superhero film Defendor. She appeared in the Deepa and Dilip Mehta comedy Cooking with Stella in 2009, also in 2009.

Ray, who appeared at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival in favor of the film, revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

Ray had a stem cell transplant in 2009 to treat her rare cancer. In April 2010, she announced that she was cancer-free thanks to the transplant. On the front page of the Indian men's luxury magazine The Man, she gave a candid interview about her personal cancer experience and surviving it.

Ray in UniGlobe Entertainment's cancer docu-drama titled 1 a Minute appeared in 2010. Namrata Singh Gujral produced the documentary, which included cancer survivors Olivia Newton-John, Diahann Carroll, Melissa Etheridge, Mumtaz, Bárbara Mori and Jaclyn Smith, as well as William Baldwin, Daniel Baldwin, and Priya Dutt, whose lives have been touched by cancer. Kelly McGillis narrated the film.

On July 5, 2010, Ray held an informal lunch for Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during their visit to Toronto.

Ray appeared in the stage play Taj in 2011, opposite Kabir Bedi at the Luminato Festival in Toronto, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Taj's book, written by Canadian playwright John Murrell, brought poetry, music, stage, and the Indian classical dance form kathak. Deirdre Kelly, a Globe and Mail columnist, characterized the project as "as luminous and poignant as the building that inspired it."

Ray appeared in Craig Goodwill's award-winning fantasy drama film Patch Town, as well as a Canadian television period crime drama series Murdoch Mysteries, titled "The Black Hand."

She appeared at the 2011 IIFA Awards in Toronto, and as a co-presenter of the 2011 Giller Prize alongside singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado and roots rock guitarist Robbie Robertson, she appeared at the 2011 IFA Awards.

Ray appeared on Oh My Gold, a five-part series on Discovery Travel & Living in 2011, before he became the host and travel guide on Oh My Gold.

Ray began starring season two of Top Chef Canada, Canada's highest-rated program, in 2012. In March 2012, the season premiered.

Ray remarked to The Telegraph in 2012, "I think every film that I've made so far has been a turning point" because I experimented with each one and increased professionally. A number of thought-provoking topics were dealt with in the films I chose.

Ray appeared in Ram Gopal Varma's Veerappan in 2016. She also played a key supporting role in 2017's Dobaara, the official Bollywood version of supernatural horror film Oculus.

Ray has been a part of an ensemble cast in the Amazon Prime Video web series Four More Shots Please! The series returned to television in over 200 countries and regions in 2020 and 2022 for its second season.

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