Evening Standard Magazine – April 7, 2006

Salman's Siren
By Annabel Rivkin
Photographs by Pascal Chevallier
Styled by Nicky Yates

When Padma Lakshmi married Salman Rushdie it looked like a trade-off between her looks and his brains. But did his age play a part in the romance? The actress talks to Annabel Rivkin about her absent father, and her determination to be a movie star

In the months after Padma Lakshmi and Salman Rushdie met and suffered their mutual coup de foudre at the now defunct Talk magazine's launch party in New York, she was repeatedly quoted as saying that, on her behalf at least, it had been love at first sight. Perhaps it was. Or perhaps she was daring us all to question Mr Rushdie's physical charms, or lack thereof. Today, six years later (and married to the fatwa'd author of The Satanic Verses for the past two), she is less emphatic. “I don't know if it was love at first sight,” she says in her breathy, American-accented way. “People are very curious and, much to my chagrin, people will say to me that all they know about me is that I am Salman Rushdie's wife. I would be a fool, or really arrogant, or both, to think that no one is going to be interested in this glaring headline in my life. I didn't set out to fall in love with the person I did; it just happened.”

And when it happened, the general perception was that he was ugly and she was stupid. “I think it's this thing about being a model,” she says good-naturedly. “But I'm very thankful for the modelling career I've had. It's served me well; it's provided a very comfortable living for me.” It's not just about being a model. Padma is a siren. Sitting before me in a Zac Posen puff-sleeved blouse, tight Stella cords and Chanel boots, it's not the empiric perfection of her face and figure that stuns so much as the slow, considered grace and expansiveness of her movements. She stretches and unfurls herself in a sort of slow dance. And yet there is a Marilyn Monroe sweetness to her. But here, with the intellectual husbands, the parallel ends because Padma has in her favour education and real backbone. She's not tough exactly, there is not that air of ruthlessness that one sometimes gets from women who have raised their expectations through their associations, but she has focus.

She was born into a solidly middle-class Brahmin family. Her mother was a nurse and her father worked for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. It has been well-documented that she was brought up between her grandparents' home in Madras and her mother's in New York, but her father, until now, had disappeared from view. I can find no interview in which she has ever talked about him. She takes a deep breath. “My parents separated when I was one, the divorce became final when I was two, and my father did not pursue a relationship with me. I approached him in 1998, and it was very odd for me because he remarried and has two other children. My half-sister, who's 25 now, was a classical dancer and a Bollywood actress, and at the same time when I contacted him, he'd quit his job at Pfizer to be her personal manager.” In an act of extraordinary tactlessness, her father brought his younger daughter to the hotel lobby where he had arranged to meet Padma. "I felt, at the time, that I wanted a relationship with him," she says, “but I think I was unprepared and not yet ready to deal with what I had opened the door to. It was very painful, it was very torturous for me to have salt rubbed in the wound. So after that I didn't see him.”

But it seems that, in terms of his parenting, neither total abandonment nor utter commitment had brought him satisfaction. “My half-sister eloped, rebelled, said that she didn't want the pressure of a performance career and she wants to work with special-needs children. She got her masters in child education at NYU and she's a wonderful woman.”

Padma's mother has had no more children but she has been married three times, so there were stepfathers in Padma's life but she is dismissive of the importance they played. “There was this guy she was married to from when I was four until I was nine,” is all she has to say about her mother's second husband, perhaps because she was living and going  to school in Madras until she was ten. “This husband she's been with for a long time. He's alright. He's a plumber, and my mother and he really get along, but we had a hard time when I was growing up because he's so conservative. He's of Indian descent but he's lived in America for many years and sometimes people like that think that they are clinging to their culture but the culture they are clinging to is 30 years out of date.” She maintains that he had little to worry about; she wasn't a minxy, provocative adolescent. “I just wanted to be a normal American teenager. I was tall and lanky and I didn't have any flesh on me; I was like a flagpole. I was a good student. I was involved in theatre and track and student government. I didn't lose my virginity until college. I wasn't doing drugs.” She didn't have much chance. Even though she was educated in America, the moment the school term ended her mother would stick her on a plane back to the grandparents. “I think my mother didn't want me to forget that part of me,” she says, and certainly no resentment is evident. "I think she wanted me to have a sense of family. Then one summer, I came back with boobs.”

Her current ambition — “to carve out an acting career that I can be proud of” — is no flash in the pan. At high school she was writing, directing and acting in her own productions. But when she began her degree at Clark University, in Massachusetts it was a psychology major. “You know, I come from an Indian family and they felt that I needed a skill, especially since university costs so much money. Clark is known for psychology courses — it's certainly not known for theatre — but I changed my major and didn't tell my family.”

It was as an exchange student in Madrid that Padma was scouted. “Modeling was so lucrative that I would have been a fool to say, 'Oh no, I'm not going to stand still while you take my picture for $5,000 a day.'” International Indian models, ten or more years ago, were rare. Padma puts her age at “in my thirties. I don't care but I don't want to lose out on any parts.” She must be in her mid-thirties but she shouldn't worry as she has a strangely ageless quality that lends her both a youthful energy and an aged wisdom, irrespective of the fact that she, miraculously, has not one wrinkle. Not one. For an animated woman, her face is rather rigid, a stillness brought on either by Botox or a profound personal mystery.

“I was the first Indian model to have a career in Paris, Milan and New York,” she says. “I’m the first one to admit that I was a novelty.” And although she modeled for Armani, Versace and Ralph Lauren, a lot of her work was lingerie-centric and even, when fate threw Helmet Newton into the equation, nude. Anyway, for whatever reason, Padma’s reputation grew. Already fluent in Spanish from studying in Madrid – “sometimes I packed my school books in my bag before I went out to dinner because I knew that I wouldn’t go to bed before class. But I learned a lot more Spanish than the exchange students who only mixed with each other” – her quick grasp of Italian led to a presenting slot on the Italian talk show Domenica In and from there she landed a couple of parts in period dramas.

For one such drama, Caraibi, set in Cuba, she put on two and a half stone, and it was her bid to lose the weight while still enjoying food that led to her cookbook, Easy Exotic. “It had been a fantasy of mine to write a cookbook because people are fascinated by what models eat,” she says, admitting that half are blessed with freakish metabolisms and the other half simply don’t eat. “I love food, but if I started modeling today, I wouldn’t work because I have curves and I never looked like a waif. But I work at it – I box and I rollerskate and I lift weights. My husband is the most sedentary person I know.” Presumably he’s sitting there flexing that huge brain.

In 1999, Harvey Weinstein had just set up a literary arm of Miramax and, when he met Padma at a premiere, he suggested she write the book. “I learned to cook from watching my mother in the kitchen. She is famous because if you arrive at her house, within half an hour she can whip something up from a box of Weetabix and two olives.” From the book came a cookery show and a documentary series called Planet Food. I know she is determined to act, but if anyone can challenge Nigella’s monopoly it’s this lissome lady.

And so it was as a published author that she encountered Salman Rushdie on Liberty Island, beneath the Statue of Liberty, in 1999. They were married in a Hindu ceremony in New York in April 2004, Padma beaming in a purple sari, Salman formal in a long black Mughal-style frock coat. She is not an idiot, quite the contrary, so it’s not such a stretch to make the link between absent father and older lover. “Maybe there’s something in that,” she says. “I think that we are attracted to what we feel we need. I don’t really know the mechanics of the thing. People ask me these very nebulous questions like, “Was it love at first sight?” And I don’t know because I’m there reacting, not clocking my reactions or taking notes. I’m sure my father had something to do with it but I’m not sure it’s a good idea to…I don’t know.”

Actually, her father is no longer completely absent. Last October, when she was on her way to India to play a concubine turned regent in Sharpe’s Challenge, with Sean Bean and Toby Stephens, the grandfather who had brought her up died at 86. “It was a real big blow,” she says. “I felt it was like my father dying. So to stuff some kind of emotional cotton wool into the bleeding hole that left in me, I re-contacted by father. When my grandfather died, I was afraid that my father would die one day and I would never have known him. Now we have a relationship and he writes me these beautiful, love-letter e-mails every couple of weeks, and I’ve asked him some very hard questions. I can either choose to, very validly, hold on the anger that I have towards my father for not wanting me and for rejecting me, or I can put that aside and decide to have a father.”

And with that decision has come a little of the hero worship that some girls feel for Daddy. Firstly, she says that she looks exactly like him. She says “he’s old” with some emphasis, but at 65 he’s only seven years older than her husband. “Well, he says he’s 65, but my mother swears he’s 69. I always thought that he would be this doddering old man with a cane and a white beard, but he is the most sexy, manic, in-shape, lean, tall, handsome man I have ever met. We walk down the street and he causes car accidents [couldn’t it be her causing these collisions?]; it’s weird. He’s very charismatic and very charming.” They say the apple never falls very far from the tree.

Padma says that she’d like children of her own, but not yet. “I want to give my career a chance. I’ve wanted it for a really long time and my job now is to carve out an acting career that I can be proud of. I’m finally starting to see the seeds that I’ve been so carefully planting, blooming. Finally, little blossomings.” And indeed, it may not be an acting job but a few weeks ago Newsweek shot her for their cover, having chosen her as the icon with which to represent India to the world their special Indian issue.

Sharpe airs later this month and on American television she is playing Moses’ (Dougray Scott in this instance) adopted mother in a high-octane ABC mini-series called The Ten Commandments that goes out next week. But it seems, for a beautiful, well-connected, famous girl, to have taken rather a long time to get this far. “Well, I’ve been flying all over the world and living a very unorthodox life and I have brown skin.” Day-to-day racism has never been a problem for her but then she’s lived a cosmopolitan life. “I don’t live in Nebraska. I live in New York and Notting Hill [about eight months a year in New York and the remainder in London]. Most of the time I’m insulated from it, but also because of what I look like I have an easier time. But that same person who’s flirting with me as he stops his car to let me cross might not stop for my mother, who has brown skin, is overweight and buying her shoes at the US equivalent of Primark. He might not be that nice to her.”

She is clear about her immediate ambitions. “I want a lead role in a good movie. Not a supporting role. I want the f***ing lead.” She is grinning but serious. In the meantime her English agent is looking for theatre work. If Kidman was theatrical Viagra, then we’re in all sorts of Trouble.

Sharpe’s Challenge will be shown on ITV1 on 23 and 24 April.