Good Weekend

Meet Vimala Raman, one of the biggest Aussie movie stars you've never heard of

Vimala Raman grew up in suburban Sydney and hung out in Westfield malls. These days, she’s mobbed in the streets in India. Meet our homegrown darling of Indian cinema.

An Australian actor with more than two million Facebook followers is about to arrive at the Sydney gala screening of her record-breaking 45th movie, but with an hour until curtain this bright Sunday afternoon, where is the red carpet? Where are the flashing cameras and the media gauntlet. Where are the fans straining at metal fences watching VIPs saunter past? Where is everybody?

The gala venue is unusual – 40 kilometres south-west of the CBD, at Westfield Liverpool – and this meet-and-greet is all very last-minute. The film's distributors only found out a few days ago that the actor in question, Vimala Raman, was in Sydney.

After winning the Miss India Australia title in 2004, and moving to India in 2005, Raman has barely been out of work. She left behind family and friends, not to mention a job in Sydney as a database analyst and her beloved purple Honda Civic hatchback (licence plate VIM 555) to pursue a career in acting. Now her retinue includes a make-up man, hair stylist and two personal assistants (one to look after her food)

Raman takes second billing on a poster for today's movie, Oppam, behind Mohanlal, one of India's most famous actors. (The film recently broke box-office records, becoming one of the five most popular ever made in south India's Malayalam language.) The woman – whose reaction on arriving in India on her first trip there at the age of six was "Wow! Everyone's brown like us!" – is the most successful Australian actor in Indian cinema history.

She slips into the cavernous cinema entry hall from the car park with her parents. She's wearing a white shirt and black pants and toting an expensive quilted Chanel bag. The area outside Theatre 5 slowly fills up while we wait for the doors to open – just about all 120 tickets have been sold in a few days – and people react as they usually do around a celebrity: giddy, goofy half-smiles, whispers in ears ("Is that her? It is, you know!") and then bashful introductions and selfie requests.

The day before, I meet Raman at another Westfield. (This one, in Hurstville, in southern Sydney, had been a haunt of hers as a teenager growing up close by.) Now 37, she has long, glossy black hair which she often smooths to one side with her hand as she talks. Her accent flips between broad Aussie and pronounced Indian. Along with strikingly large, expressive eyes, she has a broad laugh and doesn't take too much seriously. "This is the place I connect to," she says, gesturing around the open-air cafe. "It grounds me right down to my roots."

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Raman means the mall as a whole; this cafe was a car park back then. She'd catch the bus in school holidays from Narwee, the nearby suburb in which her parents still live, to meet her mates, dress up and check out boys. (Shopping centres loom large in her teenage life, as they do for many suburban kids: she recalls sneaking out of her private girls' school, MLC in Burwood, to hit the Westfield there.)

As we look down over the food court, she smiles in recognition. "I kinda knew where everything was – if you want sushi it's over there, kebab or felafel over here …"

Raman has flown to Sydney for a few weeks to spend quality time with her mum, Santha, who has just been treated for bowel cancer. She's taken a break from shooting her 46th film, Om Namo Venkatesaya, in which she plays Goddess Lakshmi, whose superpower is burning people with her eyes.

Her fame follows her. Earlier in this trip, a group of Indians had stopped as one to watch her in Pitt Street Mall. "I turned and went the other way," she says. "Not to avoid it, it's just that when I'm here, I'm here as Vimala from Sydney." 

Then there was the woman at a CBD currency exchange booth who sprang off her chair in excitement when she recognised her next customer: " 'I can't believe it's Vimala Raman!' " says Raman, recounting the scene and guffawing. " 'Can I please take a photo with you? A selfie? What are you doing here?' "

The teller couldn't understand why an Indian film star was in central Sydney, changing money.

There's racism everywhere. There's racism within India. I don't have any hatred towards Australia, or depression about it. It's funny how times have changed; it's all part and parcel of globalisation.

The catch-all term for Indian film is "Bollywood", but that refers specifically to the Hindi film industry based in Mumbai, which produces just one in six movies nationally. Other regional centres include Tollywood (Telugu language, in West Bengal), Mollywood (Malayalam, Kerala), Kollywood (Tamil, Chennai) and Sandalwood (Kannada, Karnataka).

Raman has acted in all of these, and can speak each language. "I do have a flair [for languages]," she says, with a stagey flourish. "It's a matter of being exposed to it young." There was an initial flood of roles in Mollywood's Malayalam, the language in which Oppam was filmed and which is fiendishly complex. It contains 578 characters, a base alphabet of 16 vowels and 36 consonants, and Raman says one word in her first script – she learnt her lines phonetically – took up the width of an A4 piece of paper. (She knows of actors who, instead of tackling an unfamiliar language, simply count from one to six and are overdubbed in the editing process, though she's never worked this way.)

She was born in Wiley Park in Sydney's south-west in 1980. Her family – she has one brother, Prabhu, nine years older – moved to Narwee in 1986. Raman was engrossed by the dancing in Indian movies her parents picked up on VHS from spice stores, not so much the familiar Bollywood style of "turning the lightbulb" (as she puts it, demonstrating), but a classical Indian form called Bharatanatyam.

As a toddler, her little legs would kick along with the rhythm. "I could barely walk but I'd pretend to dance. It got to the point where I was obsessive and wouldn't eat or drink my milk or do anything until they put those videos on."

One of her favourite films was a biopic about the dancer Sudha Chandran, who lost a leg in a car accident, had a prosthetic limb fitted, and flourished in her career. Raman, at about age five, incorporated this into her routine: bending her knee, tying her foot at an angle and hopping around as if she had only one leg.

"We used to tell her not to dance like that: 'Dance straight, dance straight!' " says her father, Pattabhi. Figuring that their restless daughter might as well apply herself, her parents sent her to a dance school to learn Bharatanatyam. Dances tell stories of Indian gods and are deeply rooted in Indian culture: dancers first offer blessings to the floor to apologise to the god, who holds the Earth on their pinky finger, for being about to stamp on it. "It teaches you humility and respect," says Raman. "It's a self-discipline."

She was exposed to Indian culture at home – a family friend, Dr R. Muthukrishnan, remembers her as an "amazingly smart, cute little girl" being brought to his Tamil school to learn the language of her parents – while being free to enjoy Australian culture outside it. She played sports and joined the school choir. "She would come to an Indian show in a sari and all the traditional things," Muthukrishnan says. "In the evening she would go to a disco in jeans. She is a very, very nice blend of both cultures."

Raman has reversed her parents' journey, which began in the 1970s with a little green parrot on the side of a dusty Bangalore road. Her father was walking past the Indian equivalent of a tarot card reader – you pray to the man's parrot, which plucks a card from a deck – and figured that stopping would at least help the man buy food. In return Pattabhi was told that he would go abroad within a few months.

Pattabhi, an engineer, had no intention of emigrating. Yet three months later, he took up an unexpected job offer in Singapore. Two years after that, when the role ended, he was faced with returning to India. Instead, he accompanied a friend who was applying for an Australian visa, and ended up being granted one himself.

He arrived in Sydney in 1978 with his wife, Santha, and their five-year-old son. He had $100 and no job; he had asked the only person he knew if they could stay for one night. The next morning he went looking for work and accommodation – men were honking their car horns, calling out "Black shit" and "Go back to your own country" – and found a job and somewhere to live that day. "They brought me and my brother up with everything we could ever have asked for," says Raman. "My parents are my heroes."

Raman says kindergarten was "tough", and Narwee was "completely bogan Aussie". She would come home crying, asking her mum why the other kids were calling her "Vegemite" and "brown chocolate". A boy once shoved a toffee apple into her hair, which had to be cut out. Santha, a retired Centrelink manager, remembers Vimala asking, "Why are we 'brownie'? " She replied, "Just tell them, 'brownie' is very tasty … just tell them, 'I like my colour, I'm so proud of my colour.' " But Raman offsets this by recalling that all their neighbours were friendly and welcoming.

She describes being in a shop as a child, looking at a product, and the sales assistant speaking slowly and loudly to her, as if the extra emphasis would increase comprehension, and saying: "You can't get that."

"It's funny now, when you think about it," she says. "There's racism everywhere. There's racism within India." She adds, "I don't have any hatred towards Australia, or depression about it. It's funny how times have changed; it's all part and parcel of globalisation."

The family would travel to India for a month every three or four years, visiting multiple cities and relatives, timed to coincide with events like a cousin's wedding. There were phone calls, too; in the early 1990s, before home phones were widespread in India's more rural areas, they'd have to call the local shop and ask them to fetch their relatives. Raman continued her dancing and immersion in both Indian and Australian culture, and by the time she was in high school, Australia had become more multicultural and she no longer stood out. In 2016, there are few, if any, white families left on that Narwee street.

As a teenager, Raman's prodigious talent as a dancer saw her performing internationally as well as at the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony as part of a group of 10. As a 15-year-old tourist, she had already been approached by a talent scout at Chennai's Film City studio complex. Raman's mother recalls, "We were standing and watching and suddenly this lady comes to us and says, 'Ah madam, the director wants to know if this is your daughter. He is asking if she is interested in acting.' " 

Santha sounds flustered just retelling the story. "I said, 'She's a very young girl, only in high school, and we are visiting India and not living here; no, no, no, she's very young.' And my daughter was like, 'Muuum, she's only asking!' 

Raman was flattered by the attention: "Which girl doesn't like being asked to be an actress?" She was always the entertainer, mimicking people within a few minutes of meeting them, and dancing for visitors. She would act out songs from films in front of a mirror at home. "I don't know if everyone does that," she says, "but I used to."

But while performing was fun, it was not a living. She has a degree in information systems from UNSW and was working as a database analyst at the Australian Financial Markets Association when she took part in the Miss India Australia competition in 2004. Raman only entered after her father printed out the entry form and talked her into applying. (All Pattabhi says when asked why he encouraged her is, "She's a performing-arts girl from the beginning.") Her intense training in Bharatanatyam helped her win the contest, now known as "Miss India Australia by Raj Suri". 

Suri, who runs the event, is a photographer and entrepreneur with contacts in the Indian film industry. He says Raman's secret is combining obvious talent with approachability. "One of the things that's stood her well is she doesn't ruffle people," he says. "Vimala's personality has taken her far."

In January 2005, Raman travelled to Mumbai to compete against 34 other national champions in Miss India Worldwide. She finished in the top five – Miss India UK won – and was booked to appear in an advertisement for a women's sanitary product. Film offers began arriving within a week and she was summoned by the director K. Balachander, an icon of Tamil movies and famous for discovering new talent. "It's like Alfred Hitchcock wanting to meet you, basically," says Raman.

She entered his office in Chennai as if in a dream. He told her he'd seen her photos and wanted her in his next film, Poi – his 101st and, as it turned out, his last. Raman wasn't convinced. "I need to think about it," she told him. "I don't live here, I want to finish off my studies; my parents live in Australia." Balachander spluttered, "What do you mean, you're going to think about it? Do you know who I am?"

Vimala and her dad, who had accompanied her to India, returned to their hotel. She told him she didn't know what to do. This kind of opportunity kept knocking on her door and she kept rejecting it, but what if she was making a mistake? They held a conference call with Santha, who was in Sydney, and her brother, who had moved to New York City in 2001 to take a job as a lawyer. The men were enthusiastic ("We know you've got the talent," she recalls them saying), her mother slightly less so ("Does this mean you won't live in Sydney any more?"). Why not, Vimala resolved. What did she have to lose? She agreed, and by the end of January had signed for her first movie with Balachander.

"I never thought it would be a life-changing decision for me. After that it was bam-bambam movies, and before I knew it I had a house there, I was visiting Australia, and getting my overseas citizenship in India." (She's known by locals as an "ABCD", or "Australian-born confused desi" – desi being slang for an Indian.) "I was like, 'Woah, what the hell is going on?' "

Latha Botla, the head of programming for Hyderabad-based Mana TV, has interviewed Raman several times for the city's TV5 network. She says Raman is famous – "more in south India" – for her beauty, performances, personality and classical dance, and calls her a "show-stopper". Botla believes that growing up in Australia has helped Raman's success in India "in [terms of her] discipline, friendly nature, time commitment and dedication".

Although the film was a box-office flop, Suri looks on that first casting as Raman's big break – people wanted to know more about the famous director's latest discovery. "She was so different from the girls born and brought up there," Suri says. "There's something very fresh about her."

Watching Oppam without subtitles is an interesting experience, especially when 119 people laugh at a joke and you don't know why. It's a thriller about a blind man being stalked by a murderer with a fantastically villainous moustache. Raman carries her scenes with a characteristic glint of mischief.

The movie's third song is a toe-tapping treat, a lavish production which took five days to film and would leave Baz Luhrmann breathless. It takes place at a wedding, ribbons of fairy lights streaming in all directions from the centre of the room like multiple Milky Ways, everyone in fine Indian dress, the walls panelled in white, yellow and gold. Raman leads a troupe of smiling women in a dance, all of whom float gracefully through the air in unison.

We meet again a few days later at Maroubra Beach, where Suri has been photographing her. The tall trees and surf club quickly blot out the setting sun. Raman wants to know what I thought of the film. I tell her it was good fun, but there were certain things I didn't follow, such as why the police beat the blind man's legs and hung him upside-down.

She snorts. "Like a piece of ham!"

And how the killer broke through a door with an axe like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and two minutes later he was wearing a nun's outfit, like in Sister Act. "I know! Mum said, 'They could have edited the beating scene and put more of your scenes in.' " 

Mother and daughter speak to each other every day, and Raman stays at her parents' double-storey Narwee house – the dance floor they built for her to practise on is still there – whenever she's in Sydney. Vimala is still a "very nice, down-to-earth person", Santha says. "She always does her job very well," she adds. "It makes me proud."

Raman has been successful enough to own the first floor of an eight-storey block of units in Chennai "with rooms and rooms of clothing", but is away shooting much of the time. (The perks of being in the movies extend beyond money, she says, like being invited to functions and inaugurations.) She thinks she's become "way more Aussie" since moving to India. Take a cricket Test between India and Australia. "If I'm in India, I'll be supporting Australia like anything; 'Aussie Aussie Aussie, yeah mate, go slam that shit' " – and she adopts an outraged tone – " 'How dare you, you're sitting in India, how can you not …' 'No, I'm Aussie, mate.'  

"But in Australia, if India comes to play, I'd be supporting the Indian team. It's like your right eye and your left eye. Which one do you need more? You need both."

Raman still calls Australia home, but after a decade away feels orphaned between where she lives and where she grew up. She has friends all over India, wherever she's worked: she's mobbed in some cities, touched and tugged, her hair grabbed. Dating is hard, too: people outside the industry don't understand what it's like to be part of it, but she's stoic about the price of fame.

"You get more confined to star hotels and personal parties," she says. That sounds horrible.

"It's soooo bad! I have to get my nails done every Friday! But there's no gain with no pain, right, and this is minimal pain. When you decide to take up this type of lifestyle, there are things you have to compromise on."

Giggling, she recounts a story in a gossip magazine linking her romantically with a costar. Apparently, he'd fallen in love and proposed marriage, but she'd turned him down. "He called me and said, 'What the hell is that?' I was laughing, I said, 'Since when did you propose to me?' He said, 'The worst part is you rejected me. You said I'm not good enough.' "

Maroubra Beach is almost deserted now. Raman gets the odd glance from people walking past, who continue on their way. "How nice not to have 100,000 people staring at me," she says. "Imagine if this was India. They would all be, 'Madam, madam, madam!' " She makes a fizzing sound, mimicking the bustle of a crowd. "There's no way I could sit like this on a beach in India."