Himalayan News Service

London

We know she can bend it like Beckham — now Parminder Nagra is out to prove that she can cure it like any top doctor too. On January 21, the Leicester-born British Asian actress hit the television screen in the new series of American hospital hit, ‘ER’.

Nagra plays the role of Anglo-Indian medical student Neela Rasgotra in the new series of the hospital drama, and she’s very enthusiastic about her role.

‘ER’ is likely to turn her into a major American TV star. She is the first Asian character in the soap.

Recalling the moment when she was offered the part, Nagra says: “I had to sit still and act professional, while all the time I wanted to jump up and run around the room screaming.”

Nagra, whose parents emigrated to Britain from India during the 1960s, was born in Leicester in 1975 and caught the acting bug at the age of 17 when a drama teacher asked her to take the lead role in a musical after the original star dropped out.

Her big break came in 2002 when Nagra took the role of soccer-mad teenager Jess in ‘Bend Like It Beckham’.

Nagra’s acting skills have already won rave reviews across America, but as the story goes in Leicester, her career in acting could have been different.

In 1997, Nagra began her theatrical career starring in ‘Tainted Dawn’ at the Haymarket theatre as a shy 16-year-old usher.

Sam Ireson, her boss at the time, says: “When she first came to us she was ever so quiet. She was brilliant — polite and very sweet — with the customers at the front of house, but she never really showed any signs she would become the star she is today.

“She never looked like she was going to rush on to the stage and she wasn’t very confident. She was in a few productions but as far as I remember her first major part only came when a lead couldn’t perform and Parminder stepped in at the last minute.”

Nagra, who went to Rushey Mead School in Leicester, left the theatre in 1995 and went to London to follow a career in acting.

She was offered a lead role in the 2002 film ‘Bend it Like Beckham’, opposite fellow Brit starlet Keira Knightly by director Gurinder Chadha.