Lisa Ray, born 4 April 1972, is a Canadian actress and former fashion model. Lisa Ray was born in Toronto to a Bengali Indian father and a Polish mother and grew up in the suburb of Etobicoke.
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.
She spoke Polish to her maternal grandmother and watched movies of Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray with her cinephile dad. Ray was spotted by an agent in a crowd during a family vacation in India when she was 16, when she began modeling.
Lisa Ray came to public attention when she appeared in an advertisement for Bombay Dyeing wearing a high-cut black swimsuit, opposite Karan Kapoor. Subsequently, she returned to Canada to attend university to study journalism, but a car injury which injured her mother derailed those plans.
Instead, she returned to India where she appeared on the cover of Glad Rags wearing a red Baywatch-style swimsuit. The sensation that caused led to more magazine covers, spokesperson deals and a job as host of her own show-business program. A Times of India poll named her the "ninth most beautiful woman of the millennium", the only model in the top ten.
She made her cinematic debut in 1994 in the Tamil film Nethaji opposite actor Sarath Kumar where she appeared in a brief role. Later she acted in a Telugu film Takkari Donga opposite Mahesh Babu. After turning down a number of roles, she made her Bollywood debut with the film Kasoor in 2001 opposite Aftab Shivdasani where her voice was subsequently dubbed by Divya Dutta as she could not speak Hindi.