Bipasha Basu

(born January 7, 1979) is a Bollywood actress and supermodel. She was the winner of the Ford's Supermodel of the World Contest for 1996 and is crurrently one of the mainstream Bollywood actresses.

Basu is the second of three daughters in her family. Her siblings are her elder sister Bidisha, and younger sister Bijoyeta . She was born in New Delhi, but her family later moved to Kolkata, where she won a regional beauty contest at a very young age. She has said that she had come into modelling and acting "quite by accident," because initially Bipasha had planned to either study chartered accountancy or medicine. However, she said that she dropped the idea of doing medical studies because she fainted when attempting to dissect rats.
Basu, a Calcutta based commerce graduate model won the Ford's Supermodel of the World Contest and was named Tulips Ms Super Vivacious in the same event at the remarkably young age of 17. Basu was then flown to New York by the Ford Company. She commented in an interview, "I was spotted by the world famous photographer, Steven Meisel, and featured in Vogue magazine. I was thrilled and soon had plenty of projects coming my way." Bipasha gave it all up and came back to India. She said, "Yeah, I did a lot of ads, but my heart was not in it. I started missing my family because it was the first time I was away from them. So I happily gave it all up and came down to India".

Basu made her debut film in Abbas Mustan's Ajnabee, with Akshay Kumar, Bobby Deol and Kareena Kapoor. She played a married woman who goes all out to woo her husband’s married friend, and eventually won the Filmfare Best Female Debut Award for her performance.

Besides acting, Bips, as her friends call her, did the famous video "Tu" for Sonu Nigam's album, Kismat and made a guest appearance in Jay Sean's music video Stolen.[1] In 2006, she won popular acclaim for her Item number Beedi in the song Omkara.