Lisa Ray may have been born in Canada but she actually started her acting and modelling career in India.
However, it wasn’t until she teamed up with fellow Canadian Deepa Mehta for the 2005 Oscar-nominated movie “Water” that she broke out in Hollywood.
Now, the actress is ready to break out as a writer, debuting her memoir Close To The Bone in Canada, where she gets candid about some of the hardest times in her life, including her battle with an eating disorder and her cancer diagnosis.
ET Canada’s Sangita Patel caught up with Ray, who shared why it was important for her to share her story.
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“I think what I wrote about is, there was no intervention staged for many many years because I was actually fitting into a role because I was giving the industry what they wanted of me,” Ray said.
“This sort of boney figure, extremely inaccessible actually, and it wasn’t accessible because I was literally dying, or killing myself for this image.”
Added the 48-year-old: “My real, I guess, watershed moment was ironically announcing my cancer diagnosis at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009 when I was 40 pounds overweight and on steroids.”
“That for me broke finally, it was like breaking through a wall to be able to embrace my vulnerability as well, which is really a strength.”
Ray’s multiple myeloma eventually went into remission after a stem cell transplant in 2010. However, it resurfaced in 2012.
“The main thing that I wanted to share about relapsing, of course…not necessarily easier but I had this unconditional support from my life partner, of course, who was at the same time quite gobsmacked and yet lent this incredible unconditional support,” she shared.
Now that Ray is in remission once again, she’s focused on her family and her Prime Video series “Four More Shots Please!”.
“It’s kind of a little bit ‘Sex and the City’ you know, Bombay version, and my character is actually Samara Kapur and she’s so much fun,” she expressed.
“She’s a Bollywood diva who is just over her prime and who ends up coming out of the closet and having a relationship with one of the four main characters, and I had a blast playing this character.”