Happy birthday Lisa Ray: From auditioning for Bond film to beating cancer, here are 5 major revelations by the actor-writer

As Lisa Ray turns 48 today, here are 5 revelations made by the actor, about experiences such as her cancer struggle, her mother’s car accident and a disconnect with her public image.

Lisa Ray, known in India as a successful model-turned-actor with films like Water and Kasoor to her credit, is celebrating her 48th birthday today. The cancer survivor is now also a writer and released her memoir, Close to the Bone, last year, spilling some of the deepest secrets about her life.

Lisa Ray turns 48 today.

Lisa is married to Jason Dehni and the two are parents to twin daughters Sufi and Soleil, born via surrogacy. Her Instagram page is loaded with tonnes of adorable videos of her one-year-old kids, whom she calls Souffle, when addressing them together. However, her book showed a different aspect of her life as she shared about her cancer struggle, her acting and modelling career and the accident that left her mother paralysed.

Lisa was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a cancer that attacks the bone marrow. After being declared cancer-free in 2010, she relapsed in 2012, just when she was about to get married.

Here are some major revelations by Lisa:

On her auditioning with Daniel Craig for Quantum of Solace

Lisa says she auditioned for the role of a Bond girl in Quantum of Solace. Sharing her experience of seeing Daniel Craig for the first time ahead of her audition , she says in her memoir, “I think my first mistake was that I tried to make a buddy out of him. I wanted to imprint myself on him, channel seductive siren, tell him to save the last dance for me. Instead, nervousness overtook me and I started cracking jokes. What I wanted to say was: I’m mesmerized by your blue eyes. What I said was: ‘My, how shiny are your shoes!’ I made a shoe joke. Really. This makes me cringe even now. He smiled indulgently, but a rush of energy had exited the room, like a back draft.”

On her cancer diagnosis at 37

Lisa calls herself a cancer graduate after stem-cell transplant and finally being declared cancer free. She writes about her diagnosis, “...(I)t never occurred to me that I wouldn’t get better. Almost as soon as he said cancer (or didn’t), I was framing it as just another adventure in a life that had circled the globe for three decades, plucking one experience after the other like cherries from trees. Now cells in my bones were rampaging, multiplying, squeezing out the red blood cells.”

She adds, “I had become a junior member of the MM cancer club, diagnosed at 37, while the average age is 65. Fatal. Incurable. But I wasn’t scared — not yet, anyway.”

“I never longed to be part of the industry”

Lisa caught the attention of the filmmakers when she appeared in the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song, Afreen Afreen. She went on to make her Bollywood debut with Kasoor and went on to star in Deepa Mehta’s Water. But Lisa confesses in her memoir, “I never longed to be part of the industry. Most of my most fulfilling professional moments came to me via serendipity.”

She adds, “I just went with the flow. There has been no calculation in my career, because what I always longed to do was to write.”

“I had anorexia, bulimia, I hated myself”

Lisa opened up about her success in modelling and its aftermath while talking at Sahitya Aaj Tak event. She said, “I was a glamorous figure, a sex symbol, but while I was at the height of fame, I was experiencing the lowest lows. I had anorexia, bulimia, I hated myself. Going through these extreme experiences made me an investigator of life. I had fame, money, reputation everything the society tells you need to be happy. Yet I wasn’t.”

“My career started on the edge of a blade”

Lisa’s success came with a bittersweet taste as she had found fame on one hand and trauma on the other. Talking about an accident, the writer said at the event, “I met Maureen Wadia after that with all those pictures. And then, we left for Canada. Soon after we were back in Canada, my family and I met with an accident and my mom lost the ability to walk in that accident. Call it luck, but I was supposed to be sitting where my mom was sitting in the car. We had exchanged our seats. That was supposed to be me in place of my mother. And then, on the other end of the world in India, my image was released on the cover of Gladrags magazine. So, my career started on the edge of a blade. One end was fame and on the other end was trauma.”

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