Padma Lakshmi

Photo: padmalakshmi.us
Padma Lakshmi was born on September 1, 1970. Padma Parvati Lakshmi is an Indian American cookbook author, actress, and model. She has been the host of the US reality television program Top Chef since season two. In 2009 she was nominated for an Emmy Award for hosting Top Chef along with Tom Colicchio. Her parents’ only child together, Lakshmi is the daughter of a Pfizer executive and his first wife, Vijaya a nurse who currently specializes in suicide prevention. Her parents separated when she was one and divorced a year later. Both parents later remarried.
In 1984, when she was 14 years old, Lakshmi was in a car accident, causing an injury to her right arm that required surgery, which left a 7-inch scar between her elbow and shoulder. The incident happened on a Sunday afternoon as Lakshmi was being driven home from a Hindu temple in Malibu. She remembers a flash of orange, looking over to see the large car upon her. She described the event in the April 2001 edition of Vogue, saying, "Being in a car crash was like an exhilarating hallucination, an unbelievable moment that oddly remains one of the most beautiful images in my memory."
The car left Lakshmi with injuries that included a fractured right hip and a shattered upper right arm.
From a later marriage of her father, Lakshmi has a half-brother and a half-sister who was an actress and classical dancer but is now pursuing a career with children with special needs. In an interview in The Guardian, Lakshmi said, "My father had quit his job as an executive at Pfizer to manage her career. That was kind of like rubbing salt in the wound. I didn’t understand why he wanted that relationship with her, and not with me."
Lakshmi’s career began at age 16, when she was discovered by a modeling agent in Spain while sitting in a café. As she has stated, “I was the first Indian model to have a career in Paris, Milan and New York. I’m the first one to admit that I was a novelty." She has modeled for top designers such as Emanuel Ungaro, Ralph Lauren, and Alberta Ferretti and appeared in ad campaigns for Roberto Cavalli and Versus. She was a favorite model of the photographer Helmut Newton, whose photographs of her often highlighted the large scar on her right arm.
Lakshmi had a comical supporting role as the lip synching disco singer Sylk in the 2001 American movie Glitter with Mariah Carey. She starred with Amitabh Bachchan and Jackie Shroff in the 2003 Hindi action box office failure Boom as Shiela Bardez, one of a trio of super models accused of stealing diamonds. Lakshmi was last seen on screen as Geeta with Aishwarya Rai and Dylan McDermott in Paul Mayeda Berges’ 2005 film The Mistress of Spices. She will be starring[citation needed] in Deepa Mehta’s upcoming film, Komagata Maru which was earlier titled Exclusion.
Padma Lakshmi made a 2002 guest appearance as alien princess Kaitaama in "Precious Cargo", the 37th episode of the science fiction TV series Star Trek: Enterprise. She was also hostess of Domenica In, Italy’s top-rated television show. She portrayed Sean Bean’s nemesis in the 2004-2005 iTV TV series Sharpe’s Challenge. In 2006 Lakshmi appeared in ABC’s TV series The Ten Commandments with Dougray Scott, Naveen Andrews, and Omar Sharif. She took over as host of the popular TV cooking competition series Top Chef in 2006 during its second season and has continued every season since then.
On October 1, 2009, after years of struggling with endometriosis, a condition which causes irregularities in the uterus and has been known to cause infertility, it was publicly confirmed that Lakshmi is pregnant with her first child. Lakshmi has always been coy about the identity of her unborn child’s father with reports speculating surrounding Teddy Forstmann and friend Adam Dell.
Lakshmi was brought up as a vegetarian and has admitted that because of this, she sometimes becomes "squeamish" when sampling other cultural delicacies. However, in 2009, she starred in a commercial for the Carl’s Jr restaurant chain eating a Western Bacon Cheeseburger and in her second cookbook Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet she credits the chain with bringing her away from vegetarianism during her teenage years.
Originally known as the first internationally successful Indian supermodel, Padma Lakshmi started modeling while an exchange student in Spain with Clark University where she received a B.A. in Theater Arts. She was discovered by a modeling agent while sitting in a café and since has appeared in numerous fashion editorials and walked the runway for the likes of Ralph Lauren, Emmanuel Ungaro and Alberta Ferretti and starred in campaigns for Versus and Roberto Cavalli.










