Nandana Sen
Nandana Sen (born Nandana Dev Sen in Kolkata) is an international actor, writer, and child-rights activist.Along with acting in theatre and films internationally, Nandana also promotes the cause of child protection. Nandana is Smile Ambassador for the global children's NGO Operation Smile, UNICEF India's National Celebrity for Child Protection and against Gender Based Violence, and Cause Ambassador for RAHI (India's first organization to break the silence about child sexual abuse). She collaborates with the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) as a Child Rights Expert and Juror for Public Hearings.Whenever possible, Nandana Sen has combined her commitment to child rights with her acting work.Nandana has been actively fighting to stop the crisis of child trafficking in India, both with organizations such as the NCPCR and the Terre des hommes foundation as well as addressing this topic in cinema.
Sen experienced her first taste of cinema while still a student when director Goutam Ghose tapped her to play the lead in his dark and disturbing psychodrama The Doll (Gudia) as one of the targets of a middle-age man's sexual obsession.
Her first vehicle in Bollywood was the Rani Mukherjee and Amitabh Bachchan starrer Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black (2005) in which she essayed the role of Rani's 17-year-old younger sister. Sen gave a highly proclaimed performance in the lead role and the film was applauded by both audience and critics. Time Magazine (Europe) selected the film as one of the 10 Best Movies of the Year 2005 from across the globe.
After teaming up on a succession of projects with Indian directors including Ram Gopal Varma and Ketan Mehta, Sen signed for one of the principal roles in the jarring, terrorist-themed American drama The War Within (2005) and, in the process, both made a name for herself and began to cultivate a reputation for being drawn to offbeat, challenging, and demanding roles, often with a social or political theme.
In the anti-war film Tango Charlie, Sen played the female lead opposite Ajay Devgan (also starring Sanjay Dutt and Bobby Deol) and with Anil Kapoor in My Wife's Murder. Both of these movies did well with critics and audiences. Nandana followed this by signing lead roles opposite Salman Khan in the bilingual Hollywood-Bollywood film Marigold, and Vivek Oberoi in Prince, at the same time playing the protagonist in unconventional but acclaimed films such as Strangers and The Forest.
The British television series Sharpe increased her notability. The episode 'Sharpe's Peril' featured Sen in a pivotal role. In 2007, Sen signed on to portray a young rebellious woman fleeing from law authorities in director Shamim Sarif's lesbian-themed period drama The World Unseen. In 2010, Nandana starred in the Bengali super-hit Autograph, for which she was awarded the TeleCine Award for Best Actress and the Reliance BIG Bangla Rising Star Award.
Sen, whose professional choices have included a tenure as a literary editor at Houghton Mifflin Company, is also a screenwriter, and a published writer in multiple genres, including poetry,narrative non-fiction, and Op Eds. Her first original screenplay to be made into a film was Forever, funded by Telefilm Canada. She was commissioned by Divani Films to adapt R.K. Narayan's novel Waiting For the Mahatma into a film script, and by Big Bang Company to write an original script focusing on a father-daughter relationship. Sen frequently contributes articles to newspapers and journals, and has also translated a book of poems by her mother Nabaneeta Dev Sen, titled Make Up Your Mind (iUniverse, 2013). Represented by Ed Victor Literary Agency, Nandana is writing a children's book in verse, called Kiss This Kangaroo!
Source : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandana_Sen & Google image.