Aishwarya Rai, star of BRIDE AND PREJUDICE, is profiled in the New York Daily News. The 1994 Miss World is India’s most renowned movie star, having been in some thirty Bollywood productions. Miss Rai’s wild popularity caused many headaches during the filming of BRIDE AND PREJUDICE, her first English-language film:

The scenes filmed in Amritsar, a dusty provincial city in Northern India, were mobbed by locals. “People just came in throngs and stood around,” says Rai, reached on the phone in Bombay. “It was very overwhelming for my co-stars.”

“We thought we’d need a few extra police because of the crowds that wanted to see her,” adds director Gurinder Chadha, whose “Bend It Like Beckham” was a smash hit. “We weren’t expecting that we’d need 400! We were like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”

So dense were the masses that Chadha had to whittle her wish list of images. “I would have liked to have shot Ash on the back of a rickshaw,” she says, “but there was no way we could shoot with her actually on the street. And we couldn’t do the big wide shots because there were so many people who thought Ash might be there. She’s so huge, and there are so many people in India and they just wanted to come and gawk.”

Miss Rai, who has yet to consent to an on-screen kiss, must balance being an international celebrity and a traditional Indian.

In many ways, Rai is like any Western businesswoman. She works around the clock, helps negotiate her deals and has added “producer” to her résumé. At 31, she’s unmarried, but has had several highly publicized relationships with Bollywood heartthrobs, including Salman Khan, a hunky action hero who was reportedly abusive to her, and Vivek Oberoi, an actor several years her junior. In one unsavory incident that thrilled the press, Khan made 41 threatening phone calls in one night to his rival Oberoi.

Despite the gossip, Rai remains a dutiful daughter who lives with her parents. In that way, she is similar to Lalita Bakshi, the character, based on Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, whom she plays in “Bride & Prejudice.”

“I do definitely relate to her as someone who takes pride in being Indian in roots, culture and tradition,” said Rai, who gained 20 pounds to make Lalita look more like a regular Punjabi girl. “She’s strong-willed and yet emotionally vulnerable.”

Perhaps she and Miss Zellwegger could swap weight-gaining and -losing war stories.