Padma Lakshmi
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I can't see the pics, but I know what she looks like. She is stunning.
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An article from her website Lakshmifilms.com
Vogue–April, 2006
People are Talking About Television
All Aboard
From Moses at the Pharaoh's court to cool Rodeo Drive Thieves to critters on Corfu, Joan Juliet Buck travels from B.C. to A.D. for the great new spring shows.
(Excerpt) Television is not an easy medium for God. But for Easter, there's the Ten Commandments miniseries on ABC, a lush, straightforward version cast as if it were a very good party, with Naveen Andrews from Lost, Linus Roache (conflicted hero in the film Priest), Mia Maestro (cute girlfriend in the Motorcycle Diaries), the wonderful Paul Rhys (Chaplin's brother in Chaplin), and Padma Lakshmi (gorgeous Indian wife of Salman Rushdie). The Egyptian court life is rendered in bright, luxurious scenes full of weird detail. The child Moses, head shaved, eyes outlined with black, is taken down into a chamber with his step-brother Menerith to watch a priest dig around a corpse' entrails, and annoys his tutor by asking, "Who made the gods?" The roiling dark sky that announces God looks just like the illustrations in my all-color Old Testament for children, except that this time, a mushroom cloud is brought in to help part the Red Sea. The adult Moses is played by the Scottish actor Dougray Scott, whose blue eyes and dark hair evoke a general air of Mel Gibson and with him the feverish flavor of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.
postamble();
Vogue–April, 2006
People are Talking About Television
All Aboard
From Moses at the Pharaoh's court to cool Rodeo Drive Thieves to critters on Corfu, Joan Juliet Buck travels from B.C. to A.D. for the great new spring shows.
This is pretty much her life story.Edited for length (lakshmifilms.com)
The Observer—Sunday August 8, 2004
A model who eats? She wrote the book
With beauty, brains and talent, Padma Lakshmi—aka Mrs Salman Rushdie—hardly needs to find the way to a man's heart through his stomach. But it's amazing what you can do with a bunch of grapes, she tells Rachel Cooke
It's great working with models. Well, in some ways it's great. For one thing, they know how to take a good picture, which means they get on with the job and pose with the minimum of fuss. For another, they are pretty handy when it comes to flagging down a taxi. Usually, I'm a loser when it comes to taxis, especially in New York. I stood on a frozen SoHo corner for 17 minutes before one deigned to pull over. But with a model in tow, it's a different story. Models are to cabs what carrion is to hungry crows. You just stick them at the edge of the sidewalk, hide behind the nearest trash can and wait. Your ride will be with you momentarily.
The downside, of course, is that you feel like an ugly dwarf. I meet Padma Lakshmi—model, actress, cookery writer and wife of the incredibly famous novelist Salman Rushdie—in Kalustyan's, an Indian deli on Lexington Avenue. Lord, she is beautiful—so lovely, in fact, that I spend the first few moments of our encounter in a kind of reverential stupor. When, with only a gracious smile, she hands me her Gucci bag and her goggly Costume Nationale sunglasses so she can strut her stuff for the photographer, do I feel the slightest bit put out? No. I just stand there, by the palm hearts, like some bloody coatstand.
Apparently, Lakshmi does a lot of her shopping here in Kalustyan's—or, to be more accurate, her 'housekeeper' regularly swings by on her behalf. She and Rushdie, whom she married last April, are both watching their waistlines right now so, most evenings, it is fish for supper. 'I'm getting into making pickles ,' she says, super-animated (when the tape recorder is switched on, she swoops straight into voice-over mode; as soon as it is off, she immediately flicks out the light, and you are left feeling all chilly and resentful). 'Take six lemons, cover with salt, and put them in a dark place for six months. Classic south Indian pickles. Then I have my housekeeper go and get a nice fee-lay of fish, and I marinate it with the pickles.' She serves her fillet of fish with wilted spinach, but without carbohydrates. Apparently, this is because she suffers from a common but nevertheless troubling condition known as 'my little rice belly'.
Not that she is a starver. She doesn't do diets. 'They don't work with me,' she says. 'I feel so deprived, like the stepchild at the table who can't have the roast.' Lakshmi's mysterious ability to stay slim while feasting like a queen is how she got into cookery writing in the first place. 'I had to lose 20 pounds that I'd gained for a Cuban movie. So I started cooking all my normal recipes but instead of butter, I'd use olive oil, and instead of cream I'd use yoghurt.' One night, she fed some actors. Later, these same actors happened to tell Harvey Weinstein, boss of the Miramax film and publishing empire, all about this 'really skinny model who cooks'. Not long after, she went to a premiere where she got talking to Harvey and his wife Eve. Everyone, she told them, wants to know what a model eats. Eve was intrigued and, faster than you can say coconut chicken, Miramax published her first book, Easy Exotic, a collection of low-fat recipes from around the world also featuring lots of soft-focus photographs of its author in what looked like her nightie. A weekly slot on the Food Network—Padma's Passport—soon followed. In one show, wearing a revealing silk dress, she whipped up a batch of kheer - a pudding made with rice - while explaining how each of its ingredients have a deeper meaning (milk represents our connection to our mothers, while sugar reminds us of the sweetness of life).
Easy Exotic won the 1999 Versailles World Cookbook Fair Award for Best First Book, and it sold well, too (our photographer, for one, tells Lakshmi that he is just bananas about her recipe for rajma, a vegetarian chilli dish from north India). The book is a real hotch-potch: recipes from Morocco, Spain and Italy jostle with bite-sized accounts of the author's Indian childhood.
Lakshmi is now close to finishing her second book, which is why she has agreed to meet me, and to take me to her favourite foodie haunts (alas, she is unable to cook for me; journalists are not allowed in the Lakshmi-Rushdie home, nor even to know its precise location). 'This book's going to be much bigger. I want it to be a book for the way people eat today. I don't have four hours to spend in the kitchen. Most people don't. Most people maybe have a housekeeper that cleans up after them. After Kalustyan's, we head for Chinatown, in search of fish (she thinks nothing of swinging a great big bass near her flowery summer frock, but she is a little concerned that her heels—as high as the Empire State itself—will get all fishy). Then, by way of a treat, we go to an Upper East Side pizza joint, Serafina. The owner is a friend.
'I was starting to feel a little naw-shus , I was so hungry,' she says, commandeering the menu. Whereupon she orders enough pizza to feed the cast of The Sopranos. There is pizza with cheese, pizza with tuna and, most luxe of all, pizza with white truffle. How much of all this did Ms Lakshmi scoff? Quite a lot, actually. The model approach to pizza is best described as rodent-like. She nibbles, hungrily, at the tasty centre of the wheel, before casting the crusts aside. They pile up like corn husks at the edge of a dusty field.
Padma Lakshmi was born in Madras. She came to America when she was just four years old after her parents divorced. Thereafter, she spent most of the year in New York, with her mother, a nurse, and her holidays with her grandparents back in south India (she speaks both Tamil and Hindi). 'My first taste memory is pickle,' she says. 'Even as a kid, I was really weird. I liked chillis. I used to climb up the shelves in my grandmother's pantry. The pickle jar was kept right at the top. One time, I dropped the jar and it broke. I was totally busted. At school, we used to have tamarind trees. I was so tall, the boys hoisted me up to get them. Hot and sour. Those are the tastes I like.' But, once in New York, she felt different from everyone else - not least because her unsuspecting mother would send her to school with a Tupperware box full of vegetable curry. 'Everyone used to say: "Eeeew! What's that?" They all had these little peanut butter and jam sandwiches.'
After high school, she went off to an 'expensive, liberal arts school', Clark University in Massachusetts. She was in Spain, studying for her honours thesis, when she was discovered as a model. 'In the most cliche way. I was in a cafe. I was too haughty for my own good. I said: "I'm here to do my honours thesis", and they were, like, yeah, but you can make $5,000 a day.' She giggles, excitedly. 'It wasn't the most stimulating thing in the world, but when you work with photographers like Ellen Von Unwerth and Helmut Newton, it's exciting, you know?' So did she make lots of money? 'Oh, I made plenty of money. I paid off my mother's mortgage, and my college loan. I was good with money. I set fire to a whole bunch of it, but I saved some, too.' Her debts paid off and her academic work complete, she then went back to Los Angeles, where her mother was now living.
Her plan was to teach drama in high school. Then an agent from Italy came scouting. She followed him back to Milan with just $2,000—a loan from her mother—and two suitcases to her name. 'It was liberating. A chance to be whatever I wanted to be. A clean slate. Plus I already knew the cachet that modelling gave—people coming backstage and wanting to have their picture taken with me. I was very seduced by that, I'll admit. At Clark, there were kids who drove to class in convertible BMWs, while I was eating spaghetti with onions and parmesan to pay for books. So the modelling was a way for me to level the playing field.' During this period, she worked for several big designers—Cavalli, Ungaro, Ralph Lauren, Isaac Mizrahi—and, because she was the only Asian model on the circuit, her profile steadily rose. Also, she could speak Italian. 'So it was easy for people to interview me.' Finally, to her amazement, she was offered a job co-presenting a Letterman-style TV show, Domenica In.
She did half a season before she landed the role in the Cuban movie—the one for which she was required to pile on the pounds. 'I have a degree in theatre,' she says. 'I always said that if I saw a chance to do what I was educated to do, I would grab that opportunity.' And she still hopes to make it as an actress—in spite of the various setbacks she has had so far (her role in Glitter, a truly dreadful Mariah Carey vehicle, was mostly cut, and Boom, a Bollywood thriller about three supermodels who steal diamonds belonging to Indian mafiosi, was panned). 'It's pretty brutal,' she says, of the audition circuit. 'At least with modelling, you can go home and console yourself it's not personal - they were looking for a blonde. But with acting, you think: "What am I doing wrong?" I have a degree. I work out with a coach.' She sighs. She thinks the colour of her skin may be against her.
Does she ever worry that people assume she is, well, a bimbo? 'People's own arrogance prevents them from seeing you how you really are. So it's more to do with them than with you. I get bored with people who don't see me for who I am. People are always surprised when I get business-like. I was working with a screenwriter on a book I had optioned, and I gave him notes. Afterwards, he said: "I don't like you when you're like that. I like you when you're giggling and having a beer." Well, too bad, I said. You are being paid by me. People are thrown off by someone who looks feminine, but is also strong. It's not that pretty girls aren't smart, it's that women aren't strong.'
Lakshmi met Salman Rushdie, the man who brought her to our attention, five years ago, at the party to launch Tina Brown's ill-fated magazine, Talk. 'I think Tina actually introduced us,' she says. 'But there were a lot of interesting people there - Madonna, Demi Moore - I was a very small fish in a huge ocean.' She was thrilled to meet him. 'In India, he is very, very famous. He's like Faulkner to Americans, or Dostoevsky to Russians.' Didn't she find this intimidating? ' No! He was so far removed from my universe. It didn't occur to me to make comparisons between our lives or accomplishments. I didn't care! That would be like comparing myself to Clinton. What would be the point? Would you compare yourself to Louis Armstrong?' Did she fancy him? "I would never have said that I'd be able to fancy him, but he's very charismatic, he's got a great sense of humour, he's endearing, he's a real charmer, he's a good flirter, and he loves women.' The only thing she doesn't like about him is his beard. It plays havoc with her skin.
Their early relationship was conducted entirely by telephone and that, she says, is when she fell in love. 'He was in London, and I was travelling a lot on this little book tour of mine. I was in these hotel rooms by myself so we would talk a lot.' Was she aware that he was pursuing her? 'I don't think he was! We never acknowledged the situation. But our defences were down, and so were our preconceived notions of what the other was like.' But she was literally Rushdie's ideal woman, having appeared as such in books he had written even before they met (the model Lauren Hutton once approached her and, having read The Ground Beneath Her Feet, said: 'You must be Vina,' a reference to the novel's heroine). It was almost as if he had conjured her up - and, a few months later, having separated from his third wife, Elizabeth West, Rushdie moved to New York to be with her. He modelled the heroine of Fury, his last novel, on Lakshmi, right down to the scar on her arm, the result of a serious car accident she had as a child.
'We're connected by our personal struggles,' she says. 'Neither of us is completely Western, or completely Eastern. We've created our home with each other.' But their relationship has always been the subject of copious gossip column inches: it's on; it's off; he doesn't think she's intellectual enough for him. 'Yeah. Thankfully, I don't see a lot of it. I was, and still am, trying to build this film career. Plus, I'm an American. I have no reason to be in London. He has children in England, and he is a very active dad. So we were seen apart a lot, and without each other, we were lonely, so we went out with our friends. He'd call Nigella, or Marie Helvin. But now we're married, you'll see us arriving at a premiere. He loves to go out. I like to be home in my jammies, eating popcorn. But he spends all day locked in a room. In the evening, he wants civilisation. He's very culturally oriented.'
Their wedding, which took place in a Manhattan loft, was a largely Hindi affair. The groom, 56, wore a long, black sherwani (a Mughal-style frock coat) and a silver grey dupatta (scarf). The bride, 30, wore a purple sari. Guests included Steve Martin and Lou Reed. Guests took home goody bags which contained Mac cosmetics, Padma's spice mix and her recipe for meen moilee.
Food, Lakshmi believes, is the 'main socialisation of our times' - by which she means, I think, that it brings people together. But is it also the way to a man's heart? (Not that she must require much help in that department.) 'Oh, yes ,' she says. 'Get some green seedless grapes, take them off the stems and freeze them. They become like hard, little marbles. They're great to feed your lover in bed. You can imagine the rest.
To order Easy Exotic: Low-fat Recipes from Around the World by Padma Lakshmi (Hyperion) for £8.99 call the Observer Book Service on 0870836 0885
A model who eats? She wrote the book
With beauty, brains and talent, Padma Lakshmi—aka Mrs Salman Rushdie—hardly needs to find the way to a man's heart through his stomach. But it's amazing what you can do with a bunch of grapes, she tells Rachel Cooke
It's great working with models. Well, in some ways it's great. For one thing, they know how to take a good picture, which means they get on with the job and pose with the minimum of fuss. For another, they are pretty handy when it comes to flagging down a taxi. Usually, I'm a loser when it comes to taxis, especially in New York. I stood on a frozen SoHo corner for 17 minutes before one deigned to pull over. But with a model in tow, it's a different story. Models are to cabs what carrion is to hungry crows. You just stick them at the edge of the sidewalk, hide behind the nearest trash can and wait. Your ride will be with you momentarily.
The downside, of course, is that you feel like an ugly dwarf. I meet Padma Lakshmi—model, actress, cookery writer and wife of the incredibly famous novelist Salman Rushdie—in Kalustyan's, an Indian deli on Lexington Avenue. Lord, she is beautiful—so lovely, in fact, that I spend the first few moments of our encounter in a kind of reverential stupor. When, with only a gracious smile, she hands me her Gucci bag and her goggly Costume Nationale sunglasses so she can strut her stuff for the photographer, do I feel the slightest bit put out? No. I just stand there, by the palm hearts, like some bloody coatstand.
Apparently, Lakshmi does a lot of her shopping here in Kalustyan's—or, to be more accurate, her 'housekeeper' regularly swings by on her behalf. She and Rushdie, whom she married last April, are both watching their waistlines right now so, most evenings, it is fish for supper. 'I'm getting into making pickles ,' she says, super-animated (when the tape recorder is switched on, she swoops straight into voice-over mode; as soon as it is off, she immediately flicks out the light, and you are left feeling all chilly and resentful). 'Take six lemons, cover with salt, and put them in a dark place for six months. Classic south Indian pickles. Then I have my housekeeper go and get a nice fee-lay of fish, and I marinate it with the pickles.' She serves her fillet of fish with wilted spinach, but without carbohydrates. Apparently, this is because she suffers from a common but nevertheless troubling condition known as 'my little rice belly'.
Easy Exotic won the 1999 Versailles World Cookbook Fair Award for Best First Book, and it sold well, too (our photographer, for one, tells Lakshmi that he is just bananas about her recipe for rajma, a vegetarian chilli dish from north India). The book is a real hotch-potch: recipes from Morocco, Spain and Italy jostle with bite-sized accounts of the author's Indian childhood.
Lakshmi is now close to finishing her second book, which is why she has agreed to meet me, and to take me to her favourite foodie haunts (alas, she is unable to cook for me; journalists are not allowed in the Lakshmi-Rushdie home, nor even to know its precise location). 'This book's going to be much bigger. I want it to be a book for the way people eat today. I don't have four hours to spend in the kitchen. Most people don't. Most people maybe have a housekeeper that cleans up after them. After Kalustyan's, we head for Chinatown, in search of fish (she thinks nothing of swinging a great big bass near her flowery summer frock, but she is a little concerned that her heels—as high as the Empire State itself—will get all fishy). Then, by way of a treat, we go to an Upper East Side pizza joint, Serafina. The owner is a friend.
Padma Lakshmi was born in Madras. She came to America when she was just four years old after her parents divorced. Thereafter, she spent most of the year in New York, with her mother, a nurse, and her holidays with her grandparents back in south India (she speaks both Tamil and Hindi). 'My first taste memory is pickle,' she says. 'Even as a kid, I was really weird. I liked chillis. I used to climb up the shelves in my grandmother's pantry. The pickle jar was kept right at the top. One time, I dropped the jar and it broke. I was totally busted. At school, we used to have tamarind trees. I was so tall, the boys hoisted me up to get them. Hot and sour. Those are the tastes I like.' But, once in New York, she felt different from everyone else - not least because her unsuspecting mother would send her to school with a Tupperware box full of vegetable curry. 'Everyone used to say: "Eeeew! What's that?" They all had these little peanut butter and jam sandwiches.'
After high school, she went off to an 'expensive, liberal arts school', Clark University in Massachusetts. She was in Spain, studying for her honours thesis, when she was discovered as a model. 'In the most cliche way. I was in a cafe. I was too haughty for my own good. I said: "I'm here to do my honours thesis", and they were, like, yeah, but you can make $5,000 a day.' She giggles, excitedly. 'It wasn't the most stimulating thing in the world, but when you work with photographers like Ellen Von Unwerth and Helmut Newton, it's exciting, you know?' So did she make lots of money? 'Oh, I made plenty of money. I paid off my mother's mortgage, and my college loan. I was good with money. I set fire to a whole bunch of it, but I saved some, too.' Her debts paid off and her academic work complete, she then went back to Los Angeles, where her mother was now living.
Her plan was to teach drama in high school. Then an agent from Italy came scouting. She followed him back to Milan with just $2,000—a loan from her mother—and two suitcases to her name. 'It was liberating. A chance to be whatever I wanted to be. A clean slate. Plus I already knew the cachet that modelling gave—people coming backstage and wanting to have their picture taken with me. I was very seduced by that, I'll admit. At Clark, there were kids who drove to class in convertible BMWs, while I was eating spaghetti with onions and parmesan to pay for books. So the modelling was a way for me to level the playing field.' During this period, she worked for several big designers—Cavalli, Ungaro, Ralph Lauren, Isaac Mizrahi—and, because she was the only Asian model on the circuit, her profile steadily rose. Also, she could speak Italian. 'So it was easy for people to interview me.' Finally, to her amazement, she was offered a job co-presenting a Letterman-style TV show, Domenica In.
She did half a season before she landed the role in the Cuban movie—the one for which she was required to pile on the pounds. 'I have a degree in theatre,' she says. 'I always said that if I saw a chance to do what I was educated to do, I would grab that opportunity.' And she still hopes to make it as an actress—in spite of the various setbacks she has had so far (her role in Glitter, a truly dreadful Mariah Carey vehicle, was mostly cut, and Boom, a Bollywood thriller about three supermodels who steal diamonds belonging to Indian mafiosi, was panned). 'It's pretty brutal,' she says, of the audition circuit. 'At least with modelling, you can go home and console yourself it's not personal - they were looking for a blonde. But with acting, you think: "What am I doing wrong?" I have a degree. I work out with a coach.' She sighs. She thinks the colour of her skin may be against her.
Does she ever worry that people assume she is, well, a bimbo? 'People's own arrogance prevents them from seeing you how you really are. So it's more to do with them than with you. I get bored with people who don't see me for who I am. People are always surprised when I get business-like. I was working with a screenwriter on a book I had optioned, and I gave him notes. Afterwards, he said: "I don't like you when you're like that. I like you when you're giggling and having a beer." Well, too bad, I said. You are being paid by me. People are thrown off by someone who looks feminine, but is also strong. It's not that pretty girls aren't smart, it's that women aren't strong.'
Lakshmi met Salman Rushdie, the man who brought her to our attention, five years ago, at the party to launch Tina Brown's ill-fated magazine, Talk. 'I think Tina actually introduced us,' she says. 'But there were a lot of interesting people there - Madonna, Demi Moore - I was a very small fish in a huge ocean.' She was thrilled to meet him. 'In India, he is very, very famous. He's like Faulkner to Americans, or Dostoevsky to Russians.' Didn't she find this intimidating? ' No! He was so far removed from my universe. It didn't occur to me to make comparisons between our lives or accomplishments. I didn't care! That would be like comparing myself to Clinton. What would be the point? Would you compare yourself to Louis Armstrong?' Did she fancy him? "I would never have said that I'd be able to fancy him, but he's very charismatic, he's got a great sense of humour, he's endearing, he's a real charmer, he's a good flirter, and he loves women.' The only thing she doesn't like about him is his beard. It plays havoc with her skin.
'We're connected by our personal struggles,' she says. 'Neither of us is completely Western, or completely Eastern. We've created our home with each other.' But their relationship has always been the subject of copious gossip column inches: it's on; it's off; he doesn't think she's intellectual enough for him. 'Yeah. Thankfully, I don't see a lot of it. I was, and still am, trying to build this film career. Plus, I'm an American. I have no reason to be in London. He has children in England, and he is a very active dad. So we were seen apart a lot, and without each other, we were lonely, so we went out with our friends. He'd call Nigella, or Marie Helvin. But now we're married, you'll see us arriving at a premiere. He loves to go out. I like to be home in my jammies, eating popcorn. But he spends all day locked in a room. In the evening, he wants civilisation. He's very culturally oriented.'
Their wedding, which took place in a Manhattan loft, was a largely Hindi affair. The groom, 56, wore a long, black sherwani (a Mughal-style frock coat) and a silver grey dupatta (scarf). The bride, 30, wore a purple sari. Guests included Steve Martin and Lou Reed. Guests took home goody bags which contained Mac cosmetics, Padma's spice mix and her recipe for meen moilee.
To order Easy Exotic: Low-fat Recipes from Around the World by Padma Lakshmi (Hyperion) for £8.99 call the Observer Book Service on 0870836 0885
christina126
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I just noticed that huge scar on her arm! That article says it was from a car accident. Must have been so painful.
Spiral1532
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My god, she looks like the Indian version of Stephanie Seymour. 
style_savy
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Padma Lakshmi @ The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Award Dinner 05/20/2007
celebutopia
chocolatestain
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My god, she looks like the Indian version of Stephanie Seymour.
EXACTLY what I was thinking
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