Dressed in an off-shoulder blue evening gown, Anjali Amir looks quite like a starlet. And a starlet she is.
She is playing Mammootty’s heroine in Tamil film Peranbu , which is in the post-production stage. For Anjali, acting in films has been a dream from a very young age.
But to make that dream come true, she first needed to make another dream come true: to become a woman.
She was born a boy. But a couple of years ago, she underwent a sex reassignment surgery and became a woman. She is delighted that she has become one of the few transsexual women in India to star in a feature film — that too in a lead role. “There is another actress in the film, but mine is the main role,” she told The Hindu here on Thursday. “I am indebted to Mammootty for this break; he was the one who recommended me to director Ram.”
Mammootty came to know of Anjali from a television news report. “I was going through a rough time then,” she recalls. “I had been dropped from a television serial shortly before it went on air because I am a transsexual. Now I feel it was good that I did not do that serial; if I did, I would not have got this opportunity to act in a film, that too opposite Mammootty.”
She has always been his fan, even when she was a boy. “I had watched him shoot for Vesham while I visited my cousins in Kozhikode during my school days,” she reminisces. “I could only watch him from a distance.”
She was about 10 then. “And that was the time when I had begun to realise that I was different from other boys,” she says. “My friends were mostly girls, along with whom I participated in dance competitions at school, in Thiruvathirakali, Oppana and group dance, dressed as a girl.”
A few years later, Anjali decided to become a woman. “That shocked my relatives; I come from a conservative Muslim family,” she says. “So I left home. I am based in Coimbatore these days. Now, most of my relatives have begun to accept me.”
Anjali is focussed on her acting career. “ Peranbu is also being made in Malayalam,” she says. “I cannot say much about my role except that I play a Malayali girl called Meera. I am also doing another film in Tamil and one in Telugu. I also continue to do modelling.”
Life appears to be finally looking good for this pretty woman.
