2007 Shilpa Interview..
'I didn't break up anyone's marriage': Unrepentant Shilpa Shetty answers the ex-wife who accused her of stealing her man
By LESTER MIDDLEHURST
Last updated at 17:02 31 December 2007
Tall, handsome and most of all rich . . . nearly everything about Raj Kundra shouts "eligible".
So when the 32-year-old millionaire and Shilpa Shetty were first seen together last summer, a bit of speculation was inevitable.
Shilpa, after all, was famously single despite voluptuous good looks that stare down from the bedroom walls of millions of teenage boys.
Raj, meanwhile, already has a financial toehold in the Bollywood film industry.
Shilpa Shetty became well-known in Britain after appearing in Celebrity Big Brother
Scroll to the bottom of the page to watch Shilpa Shetty's new year video message to Mail on Sunday readers...
They were first seen publicly at the London launch of her perfume, S2, in June. They were together again at the IIFA awards, the Bollywood "Oscars" held in Leeds. Then, as the months went by, they seemed inseparable.
As an Indian woman of 32, Shilpa is coming under increasing pressure to marry - and her forceful mother, Sunanda, is said to approve of Kundra as a match.
If the auguries are promising, however, the woman herself has remained curiously coy. Time after time she has refused to comment about her handsome shadow, save to issue firm denials. Raj Kundra, she said, was no more than a business partner.
Until now. Prompted perhaps by a new-found sense of happiness and security, Shilpa has confirmed to The Mail on Sunday that she and Raj are an item, her first romance since she arrived on British television screens last winter.
In an unusually frank interview, the actress-turned-reality TV star reveals that the new relationship has transformed her life, bringing a long period of loneliness to an end.
She also admits, remarkably, that her glossy good looks have not always been a source of contentment - far from it - and that at one point anxiety about her appearance drove her to undergo a near-disastrous "nose job" that even today she regrets.
For the moment, though, such worries are well behind her.
"I am dating somebody," says Shilpa, shyly. "I have known him for some time but I have only just started to know him better.
"I hope he will be the one but I don't want to say too much because it is still very early on in our relationship."
It is pretty clear that the man in question is Raj, a London-born entrepreneur, who, it is claimed, has made a fortune with jewellery and film businesses here and in India - although few formal records of his wealth exist in this country.
Not my fault: Shilpa is defiant about her love affair with millionaire Raj Kundra
"I'm not going to deny that it's him but please don't say it is because I don't want to frighten him off," she says.
It is a slightly puzzling sentiment. Raj does not look like a man who will be frightened away. He arrives with Shilpa when we meet, and is there to take her away afterwards. Their body language is unmistakably intimate.
"He respects and understands what I do and it is nice to be cared for," she says. "I have been very lonely for a very long time and it is nice to know I have somebody to look forward to seeing at the end of the day. At last I feel normal.
"It has been an incredible year for me but I have also been very lonely. I have been away from home, in a foreign country and I haven't had a boyfriend for a very long time.
"I need someone to woo me. Magazines are always saying I am beautiful and millions of men want to woo me, but none has come forward because they are all so scared.
"I can go to a party and sense that men really like me but they are in awe of me and won't come and ask me for a date. Being an Indian actress is bad enough but now I'm a celebrity in the UK it's too much. It would take a really secure man to handle the media attention.
"I'm eulogised by a lot of men, but they wouldn't take me home to meet their mothers."
But there may be other reasons for Shilpa's caution, reasons that go beyond the natural modesty expected of Hindu women.
For if Raj Kundra is Mr Right in most respects, the very public emergence of his angry ex-wife and a baby of 15 months have complicated matters.
Raj's former wife Kavita has publicly accused Shilpa of helping break up their marriage. She claimed her husband had become so obsessed with Shilpa that reconciliation was impossible, and even that they had started an affair.
Shilpa denies all impropriety. But sexual shenanigans are not encouraged in a Bollywood goddess, and the mere accusation is potentially awkward for her reputation.
"I was really upset by what she said," says Shilpa. "She knew very well that I didn't even know her husband when she walked out on him.
"I didn't even know him when I went into Big Brother. I have known him for about only six months, which was four months after his wife had left home and he had already got a divorce by then."
This is not the only occasion she has been mixed up in romantic speculation; she has learned her caution the hard way. In 2005, she was said to have become close to Bollywood director Anubhav Sinha. He left his wife shortly afterwards. In this case, too, Shilpa has been adamant there was no wrongdoing.
She is more forthcoming about her relationship with Bollywood heartthrob Akshay Kumar. They went out for two years when she was in her 20s, despite her parents' disapproval, and she admits he broke her heart.
"It was a very low time for me. I did love him and I did want to marry him and I lost out on a lot of work because people thought we were getting married. I used to be so vulnerable-and naive and it took that experience to make me wake up."
The episode taught her a great deal about taking control of events. "Everything I have achieved so far and the person I am today is down to that relationship ending," she concludes.
Shilpa may have been unknown here before Big Brother, but in India she was already a household name, with more than 40 films on her CV.
Shilpa was born in 1975 in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Her first love was modelling - her mother's profession - rather than film. She was gawky in her teenage years, however, complaining she had too much baby fat: "I lost every beauty competition that I went into."
She was also on the small side. At 15, her then height of 5ft 7in was too short for the catwalk so, even though she subsequently grew an extra one-and-a-half inches, Shilpa found herself in Bombay, the heart of the giant Indian film industry.
Success, she says, came surprisingly quickly. "Somebody saw my photographs and offered me work," she recalls. "My first film did extremely well and I quickly became very popular."
She acknowledges that her looks have stood her in good stead. There is no disputing that she is ravishing in person as well as on screen, yet she insists that she is not the perfect beauty everybody makes her out to be.
"If you saw me without concealer, you would see that I have raccoon eyes. And I think my forehead is too small," she says.
"I am not quintessentially beautiful. I am photogenic but that's only because I have learned how to make the best of what I've got from the make-up artists I have worked with."
Her brush with plastic surgery - a matter of widespread speculation - came early on.
"On my second film, I was playing a snooty millionairess and the director, a complete eccentric, felt my character ought to be looking down her nose at everybody and he thought my nose was too flat so he said I had to get it done."
It was, she says, a terrible error. "I was 18 and very naive and thought that if it was going to make me look better and get me more work then I should do as he said.
"Anyway, it was the worst experience of my life. I had an implant inserted into my nose and then it started to shift. Before, I'd had a straight nose and suddenly I had a hideous nose that was out of true.
"It was extremely painful and in the end I had to have corrective surgery in New York. Even now, I have sinus problems because of it."
Shilpa talks endlessly about the virtues of her mother Sunanda, the woman credited with controlling and developing her career.
She believes their close bond is due in part to a difficult pregnancy. "The doctors told my mother that she was going to give birth to an abnormal baby and they advised her to abort me," explains Shilpa.
"But she refused to have an abortion and had complete bed rest for four months.
"When she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant, she fell down the stairs and still didn't lose me. She has told me that because I survived the birth, I will survive anything."
There are few privations to endure back in India. The Shettys are well-to-do manufacturers, making aluminium bottle tops for the pharmaceutical industry.
At home, Shilpa has her own living quarters in the sprawling Bombay apartment where her mother and her younger sister Shamita - also a Bollywood actress - live. Servants are constantly on hand.
The row over the seemingly racist treatment of her on Big Brother guaranteed worldwide fame. Shilpa then went on to create another diplomatic incident when she attended an AIDS awareness event in India in April with Richard Gere.
The Hollywood star kissed her on the cheek in public and all hell broke loose in a country where such displays are taboo. Says Shilpa: "The reaction was demented. We are not a backward country but a foreigner kisses me on the cheek and there is a huge ruckus.
"Then a politician tried to get some mileage out of it by having me charged with an act of criminal offence for allowing myself to be kissed." Shilpa was arrested, but the charge was quickly thrown out by the courts.
"Poor Richard was so worried he fled the country and called me on the phone immediately afterwards to apologise."
Now that she has finished her threemonth British tour of the musical Miss Bollywood, Shilpa is returning to India to make another Bollywood film.
She has also brought out a yoga video which has just gone on sale. "I have been doing yoga for a long time and it has helped me a lot so if I can help other people that would be great. It's not just a money-making racket but I'll be happy if it does make money."
Shilpa says she has already set her sights on Hollywood and that she would love to star in a Bond movie --but she draws the line at 'lip-locking'.
"The thought of kissing somebody I don't love on the lips is just not me," she says. "I can't be worrying about what other people think of me. I am my own person and I have made it this far on my own.
"This is me, take me or leave me. I don't owe explanations to the rest of the world, only to my family."
It is a strong, defiant stance. But no doubt she will be watching carefully to see how this goes down.
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