Parminder gets her goal

Arriving for our interview at the Electric Brasserie in Notting Hill, I walk straight past Parminder Nagra. After scanning the room in vain for a few moments, a waitress points to where a young woman with a neat cropped bob and black-rimmed glasses is sitting outside in the sunshine, sipping a latte, dressed casually in white T-shirt and jeans. I could be forgiven for my mistake.

Despite the phenomenal success of Bend It Like Beckham, in which 27-year-old Parminder had the lead role as the tomboy football prodigy, it was her pretty, blonde co-star, 18-year-old Keira Knightley, who went on to become a household name.

While Parminder returned to relative anonymity, Keira was on the front cover of numerous magazines, cast first as Lara in TV drama Doctor Zhivago, and then landing a plum role in a Hollywood movie alongside Johnny Depp. By contrast, Parminder was offered two Channel 4 dramas.

Nothing to complain about, but she was the more experienced, and some would say much more talented, actress. Does she resent her former co-star's success? Is she wildly jealous and resentful?

She bursts out laughing. It turns out Keira is now one of her closest friends. "Keira had already played a small part in Star Wars, which meant she was signed to an American agent," she says. "So, I don't think it was just down to me being Asian. I had to have faith that my time would come."

And it has. Finally. Two weeks ago, while in Hollywood promoting the American release of Bend It Like Beckham, she was offered a regular slot on ER, as a young British intern - a role, the producers said, that was going to be written especially for her.

She starts filming next month. With one meteoric leap Parminder has overtaken Keira. With a contract ensuring three years' work, it's fair to assume her future in acting is secured.

There are almost no female Asian stars in America and so, for Parminder, Hollywood was the ultimate glass ceiling to crack and she has done it almost effortlessly. After maintaining a semblance of calm for the first few moments of our talk, she is soon tripping over her words in excitement, giggling breathlessly as she recalls the surreal events of the past few weeks.

"I had to sit still and act professional, while all the time I just wanted to jump up and run around the room screaming," she says, eyes shining. "I just gulped and said, 'Yes.' But when I walked out of that building I was all teeth."

She immediately phoned to warn her family that LA could be her home for the next few years. "I rang my mum from LA airport," she grins wryly, "and told her I'd got this big part and she replied, 'Oh good. Are you still doing your prayers?'"

But don't ever say that her success is because Indians are considered to be "in vogue" after two recent boxoffice hits - Beckham and East Is East. "A couple of years ago someone said to me, 'Oh, it's really hip to be Asian,' and it made me so angry - all these people banging on about my Indian upbringing and arranged marriages. One journalist in America asked Keira what it had been like working with lots of Indians. I couldn't believe it!.

"I get upset when people start asking about my upbringing and arranged marriages - they are attaching a stereotype to me. If I then talk about it, I am reinforcing those stereotypes." She sighs and looks at her lap, suddenly bored with the whole topic.

For the record, she wants to stress that, unlike her character, Jess, in Beckham - whose mother hates her playing football and can't wait to get her married - Parminder's family has never disapproved of her career. Her Sikh parents moved from Punjab to Leicester in the mid-Sixties; her father to work in his cousin's transport company as a book-keeper, while her mother became a packer in the local factory, a job she still holds today. Parminder had a happy childhood - "aunties and uncles were always in and out of our house" - and went to the local comprehensive, where she picked up the acting bug in school plays.

Although her parents had an arranged marriage, they have not put pressure on her to do the same.
"They might have joked about that nice Indian boy down the street but it wasn't serious," she shrugs. In fact, last year she ended a five-year relationship with an Irish actor called Kieran Creggan. "My parents knew and didn't mind," she says firmly.

"If at times they told me to give up acting, it was because they saw a good job as being nine-to-five - it was about security, having a roof over my head." She moved down to London aged 18 to pursue her career. It wasn't a happy time. "It was the loneliest place I'd ever been to - I only had £200 in my pocket." She then landed a part in Sleeping Beauty at the Stratford East Theatre.

"I remember one audience member asked me, 'So how does it feel playing Sleeping Beauty?'

The implication was that I was unsuitable because I wasn't a blue-eyed blonde. I hadn't even thought about it that way. Sometimes I have to step outside of myself and realise others see me differently."

She found herself living alone in Peckham, unable to get any acting work and having to get up every morning at 4am to go to a stocktaking job. She was plucked from obscurity to play the role of Jess - "It was amazing. The director cast me immediately.

"I didn't even have to audition and I'd never played football in my life" - and financial security is no longer a problem. Soon she'll be able to afford to put a much larger roof over her parents' heads.

"She's so stubborn, my mum," Parminder smiles. "Even if I was able to give them enough money so she didn't have to work any more, she'd never give up that job - she likes gossiping with all her mates."

Her role in ER proves times are changing. Bend It Like Beckham proved that an unknown Asian actress could carry a box-office hit.

Parminder nods: "Recently, I got a fan letter from a 13-year-old Asian-American girl, saying what an inspiration I was to her because she also wanted to be an actress. And the fact I've now been cast as Viola in Twelfth Night must mean that I'm not being stereotyped, but am being seen as an actress in my own right."

Parminder might look demure and slight, but there is a hard determination beneath her polite reserve. Amid the rush of excitement, and the practical stuff about packing and selling her north London flat, "there is also fear, a feeling of standing on a precipice", she admits, looking momentarily apprehensive.

"I love London, going out for a glass of wine and chin-wagging with my mates; I'll really miss that." But she quickly brightens. "As my friend told me the other day, in a few weeks I've gone from Cricklewood to Hollywood, and I can't complain about that now, can I?"

Twelfth Night is broadcast on Monday, 5 May, on Channel 4 at