Varma speaks her mind

It certainly was a catchy headline in London's Telegraph -- Indira Varma: From the naked to the dead.

But it wasn't like Varma, who had nude scenes in Mira Nair's hit film Kama Sutra over 11 years ago, hasn't done anything between that, her debut film, and her lead role in David Hare's controversial anti-Bush Iraqi war drama, The Vertical Hour. Her work in the hit HBO television series Rome was so convincing that many people might not have realized that it was a half Indian woman who was stealing the scenes in the historical drama. Varma's mother is Swiss-Italian.

But then you can't really blame the Telegraph for coming up with a sexy headline, since Varma spoke of the milestone films and television shows in her career, including Kama Sutra.

The interview ran on the eve of the London opening of Hare's play.

Varma, 34, who has taken on her quota of vulnerable characters -- a torture victim in Harold Pinter's One for the Road, and a soldier's wife who eventually commits suicide in Rome -- told Telegraph that she did not realize when she read the Kama Sutra script there would be explicit scenes in the film. The British-born actress took up Nair's film soon after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in1995.

'It wasn't called Kama Sutra when we were filming it,' she said. 'It was untitled. And then it says in the script, they make love. When you're young and naive and stupid you don't process the idea that it will take one day with your kit off to shoot that sentence.'

She remembered phoning home crying, and her dad saying, 'Don't worry, at least there's no sex in it.'

Her father, who she'd kept in the dark about the film's content, never saw Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, she told the newspaper.

Though the film was a hit, it stalled her career for a couple of years, she said, because she was getting only Asian roles in such films as Jinnah.

In another interview three years ago, she complained that some people still thought of her as a porn star.

'I've been doing serious acting for as long as I've been working,' she said, 'but sadly, most Asians don't attend plays or tune into what they consider arty dramas, but I know they'll watch (Gurinder Chadha's) Bride & Prejudice. It's not exactly serious acting, but at least I won't be seen as the porn star that some people think I am!'