Freida Pinto is not one to shy away from a grand gesture. “As my friends  and family are quick to remind me, I have always been a big drama  queen,” Pinto, 26, recalls over breakfast in a Midtown hotel suite. “As a  child, I would stand in front of the mirror and pretend I was this or  that person from television. All I needed to do was realize it and  recognize what I wanted to do.”        
 For Pinto, the epiphany came at 11, when India’s Sushmita Sen won the  1994 Miss Universe competition. “The country was really proud of her,  and I was like, One day, I want to do the same,” Pinto says in her  clipped, slightly accented English, which betrays her middle-class  upbringing in the suburbs of Mumbai. “It wasn’t just the glamour of it  all because I think at 11, I could hardly understand what glamour was. I  really wanted to be like her — appreciated and a source of inspiration.  I think that’s what made me go into acting.”        
 Fortunately, Pinto’s genetic gifts meant that having a career inspired  by a beauty queen was a possibility. (Before her crossover success as  Latika, the female lead in the 2008 hit “Slumdog Millionaire,” Pinto was  a model and the host of a television travel show.) And although she is  an eloquent interview subject, her responses occasionally sound like the  platitudes you might hear from a contestant being grilled in a beauty  pageant.        
 But Pinto is ever the good sport. After it is pointed out to her that  she has a habit of answering in evening-wear-competition oratory, she  checks herself a couple of times and allows, “There I go again, sounding  like a Miss Universe contestant.” It’s a candor that is also evident  when she is asked about her appearance in 
Woody Allen’s latest London-based  ensemble film, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” to be released next  month. In a case of art imitating life, Pinto’s character, Dia, a  gorgeously exotic musicologist — is there any other kind? — leaves her  fiancé for another man. (In January 2009, Pinto called off her  engagement to Rohan Antao and started dating her “Slumdog Millionaire”  co-star Dev Patel.)        
 “I feel what I did was right,” she says of her real-life breakup. “There  were no two ways about it. But when I walked into Woody’s office and  read the scene in the nursery, where Dia confesses for the first time  that she has doubts about what she is getting into, I was like, Has  someone been reading the gossip magazines to Woody?”     
   
 The gossip magazines certainly had a field day with Pinto’s personal  life, after Antao gave an interview to a British tabloid about their  relationship and Indian newspapers claimed the two had in fact been  secretly married.        
 “Everyone is going to write you off for one thing or another, but you  know what?” Pinto continues. “It’s my life, and if I didn’t go through  it, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, sitting here talking about what  happened back then and being a little more knowledgeable about what  happens in relationships.”        
 Not having appeared in any Hindi-language films, Pinto admits that she  has a way to go before she convinces the doubters back home in India,  who know her only as a professional beauty and for her role in “Slumdog  Millionaire,” that she has the acting chops to match her cheekbones. And  although she holds her own in “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,”  alongside a cast that includes 
Josh Brolin, 
Naomi Watts and 
Anthony Hopkins, Pinto’s character is  little more than imported wallpaper. Ask Woody. “She’s the perfect  obscure object of desire,” Allen said via e-mail. “She’s exactly what I  wish I saw when I look out the back window of my house in Manhattan.”        
 Pinto’s desire not to be reduced to the subject of a gaze or to  paparazzi bait may be realized with the December release of 
Julian Schnabel’s film “Miral,” based on  Rula Jebreal’s novel, which follows an orphan (played by Pinto) as she  falls in love with a 
Palestinian  activist during the first intifada. Not that Pinto is worried about the  difference of opinion the movie is likely to generate. “I knew it was  going to be one of those stories that will create a lot of controversy,”  she says. “But there are stories that need to be told, and if you’re  always going to live in fear of what’s going to happen, you’re really  not being truthful to yourself. For me, it’s not only an excellent  opportunity to prove myself as a serious actor, but also to make a  difference in the world.” She smiles, knowing that Miss Universe could  not have put it better.