Turning surviving into an art

Jimi Mistry, who wears a turban gracefully, gives a dynamic performance in the part of a wronged and misunderstood man in the just completed independent film Partition directed by distinguished Canadian cinematographer Vic Sarin. Mistry has played many Asian characters on British television and in films (The Guru, East Is East). But his newest film could be his most challenging one.

The son of an Indian physician and Irish mother, Mistry, 33, wanted to be a singer and dancer like Michael Jackson, he says with a chuckle.

"It was very clinical how this happened," he recalls, explaining how he went to drama school. His father had sat him down over 15 years ago, telling him, 'Son, you don't have the grades. What are you going to do with your life?'

Mistry confessed: 'I don't know.'

But his father had a plan: 'Okay, here's what we are going to do. You're going to go away and you're going to write a list of your bad points and the good points you think you have. You're going to come back and we're going to try and find a career for you."

By the time the two had spent over an hour going through the list, Jimi's acting points looked impressive.

But he had a miserable time in acting school, he says.

'In drama school, it appeared to me they wanted you to change. You had to become an actor,' he confessed in an interview. 'Become a blank canvas' -- in British schools -- which basically means to me that you have no character. There's nothing about you that anyone would want to employ you for. Then I soon realized, 'Hold on, I could actually be myself and do this.' I suppose it's a late thing for me. I've become more committed over recent years.'

His father never misses a television show or a play or a film in which Jimi performs.

'Every single little thing I've done, he's come and seen,' he says. 'He's so proud and I think he's actually quite relieved that I'm doing something (laughing). I think originally he was a bit worried because I was a dreamer, a drifter, and this kind of clicked."