Life is a roller coaster of characters and Koel Purie is having a blast bringing them alive. By Reshmi Chakraborty

It’s exciting to be Koel Purie. Or at least do what she does.

She has just finished having a heart valve replaced amidst high drama between her lover and husband! It’s of course for a hospital drama called Holby City on the BBC. “It was great fun but I kept being told that I was looking too perky to have a weak heart,” says Koel, whose own heart is in the right place — theatre.

Setting The Stage
The daughter of India Today’s Aroon and Rekha Purie, Koel burst into the acting arena as the dysfunctional, society girl Nikita in Rahul Bose’s Everybody Says I’m Fine and more recently as a coke-sniffing model in Ashwin Kumar’s Road To Ladakh .

The trendy actress has also got standing ovations while playing Shakespeare’s heroines. And the acting bug has bitten hard: “I thought I would only get dysfunctional society girl characters, but having played pure-at-heart Desdemona, I’d like a go at playing everything and anything,” she claims.

The ex-Modernite has done almost everything connected to the media. She’s assisted Deepa Mehta in the film Earth , produced and acted in a Hindi soap Aaj Ki Nari , read the news on India Decides Election Special , anchored the travel show Great Escape apart from doing dollops of theatre, both in India and England.

If that wasn’t enough, Koel is a Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) graduate. Something she’s immensely proud of despite wanting to “drop out at least twice every day” while she was there. Fortunately, she didn’t. “I stuck with it because I had worked quite hard to get into it and I’m not a quitter.”

For three years, Koel slaved over “painfully boring Stanislavsky stuff, the importance of which I saw only in hindsight,” and the experience has made her wiser and richer. “It’s hard to get any perspective on a period that takes over your life and changes it so drastically,” she says wisely.

Certain reasons to love RADA were purely practical. “For three years, you get to do the thing you love most — acting — without worrying where the next job will come from, when your agent will call or the name of the person you bumped into at a party who might take your career into fantastic new places,” says Koel, who discovered her love for theatre while playing Desdemona in a sold-out production of Othello at the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester Square, UK.

“A live audience gives you instantaneous approval or disapproval at every moment of your performance; the immediacy is magical,” she raves.

Social Whirl
Does being her father’s daughter make life easier? Not when you are Koel, who clearly doesn’t like flaunting her family for the sake of it. “My parents don’t move in ‘filmi’ or theatre circles, so I’ve had to do my own networking and make my own contacts,” she points out.

But parental support she has aplenty, whether in mum Rekha taking everyone she knew and “a few she didn’t”, to see ‘Everybody Says I’m Fine’ over 50 times at the cinema or dad Aroon crying with pride every time he sees her on stage.

Her love for theatre was natural, unexplained. “I think this job actually chooses you, haunts you and until you find it, you move aimlessly from job to job unfulfilled...” she philosophises.

For now, Koel is on a roll, shooting in diverse landscapes like Ladakh and Ireland playing a gamut of characters. Any spare time sees her cosying up with her “gorgeous boyfriend” in England, dancing, eating tonnes of ice cream and watching endless episodes of Friends , unnoticed and unpaid.”

Whatever she does, there are always grand plans, “I want to jet set glamorously between England, India and the rest of the world and keep all possible plates spinning.”
And much deservedly, have a blast!