Katrina Kaif

Katrina Kaif's Rise to Stardom in Bollywood

Katrina Kaif's greatest problem, when she entered Bollywood, was her inability to speak proper Hindustani. Katrina Kaif was fourteen, when she first started out on her career, as a model for jewellery campaign in London and was first discovered by London-based Kaizad Gustad, who cast her in his film, "Boom." She persevered through a few flops, but quickly made her way to the top, within eight years.

Born in Hong Kong to an Indian Kashmiri father and an English mother, she spent the first few weeks of her life moving from one country to another and finally settled down for a couple of months, in England, before arriving in Mumbai. From 2005 to 2009, she completed several movies, which were not box office material in Hollywood though she started displaying signs of a star in the making, in films such as Namastey London and Apne. From then on she was unstoppable. She went to improve her acting skills and improving her Hindi, so that she no longer had to get her conversations dubbed.

From then on Kaif did not look back. She was cast against Akshay Kumar, in Singh is King and with John Abraham in Kabir Khan's drama of terrorism, New York. She proved that she could perform equally well in character roles as well as glamour roles. In 2009, she received the first nomination for Best Actress category for Filmfare Awards. This year, 2011, she starred in the box office hit movie, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.