page_title: Preity Zinta
section_title: Professional expansion (2007–2008)
hierarchical_section_title: Preity Zinta / Acting career / Professional expansion (2007–2008)
caption_attribution_description: English: Preity Zinta felicitated at Giants Day Awards
context_page_description: Preity G Zinta is an Indian film actress and entrepreneur. After graduating with degrees in English honours and criminal psychology, Zinta made her acting debut in Dil Se.. in 1998, followed by a role in Soldier in the same year. These performances earned her the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut, and she was later recognised for her role as a teenage single mother in Kya Kehna. She subsequently established a career as a leading actress of Hindi cinema with a variety of character types. Some of her roles, deemed culturally defiant, along with her unconventional screen persona have been credited with contributing to a change in the concept of a Hindi film heroine, and won her several accolades.
  Following critically appreciated roles in Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, Dil Chahta Hai, Dil Hai Tumhaara, and Armaan, Zinta received the Filmfare Award for Best Actress for her performance in the drama Kal Ho Naa Ho. She went on to play leading roles in two consecutive annual top-grossing films in India, the science fiction film Koi... Mil Gaya and the romantic drama Veer-Zaara.
context_section_description: Following the failure of two of her commercial releases, Zinta decided to venture into art films, a movement of neo-realistic films known in India as parallel cinema. She acted alongside Amitabh Bachchan in her first English-language film, Rituparno Ghosh's film-within-a-film drama The Last Lear (2007). Zinta played Shabnam, a struggling film actress working on a new project opposite Shakespearean actor Harish Mishra (played by Bachchan) in the midst of a turbulent relationship with her possessive husband. The film premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival and was received well. Later reviews in India were approving, with Rajeev Masand writing that she "gets through her scenes competently, never allowing her cute-as-a-button image to take away from the impact she makes here as a conflicted, mature woman". Sukanya Verma called Zinta "palpably vulnerable" but lamented the English dialogue, finding it distracting "from the seriousness of the situation". The Last Lear was named the Best English Film at the 55th National Film Awards. Initially dismissive of art films, Zinta eventually spoke positively of her experiment with the genre, confessing, "I did think with art films that they don't pay you, they don't feed you, but I was wrong, and I'm so happy to be here."
  Zinta next starred in Samir Karnik's Heroes (2008), a three-chapter road movie about two film students who, as part of an assignment, travel across North India to deliver three un-posted letters written by army personnel who lost their lives during the 1999 Kargil war to their families. Zinta is featured in the first chapter as Salman Khan's war widow, Kuljeet Kaur, a woman who becomes the sole breadwinner of the family and single-handedly raises her son. In preparation for the role, Zinta attended Anupam Kher's acting school, "Actor Prepares" to learn the dialect and mannerisms of a Punjabi woman. The film was released to a mixed critical reaction, but her performance received rave reviews; Anand Singh of Hindustan Times wrote: "Karnik is merely interested in wringing tears the old-fashioned way, and not in starting a debate. He succeeds—mainly because Preity Zinta brings to a role a gravitas and dignity that is seen on the faces of ordinary women—this may be her coming of age as an actress."
  In the same year she played the leading role of Chand in Deepa Mehta's Canadian film Heaven on Earth, a Punjabi language mystical drama based on the true story of a young Indian woman who, after an arranged marriage to a non-resident Indian man from Canada, migrates to Toronto and becomes a victim of severe domestic abuse. Expressing her desire for "a new kind of acting challenge", Zinta described Mehta as one director she was longing to work with to fulfill it. To prepare for the part, she read and watched several books and documentaries on domestic violence. As the film was to be shot entirely in Punjabi, a language that was totally alien to her, she learnt it in a crash course of fifty days. She confessed to not being able to emotionally disconnect from the part during the making of the film: "I never knew a character would affect me so deeply. I've become completely withdrawn and introspective... I can't snap out of the character." She eventually called it her most challenging project, as it helped her "shed everything that Preity Zinta was about". Heaven on Earth was first screened at several film festivals and, upon release, garnered career-best reviews for Zinta. Her performance earned her the Silver Hugo Award for Best Actress at the 2008 Chicago International Film Festival, for "her strong yet subtle performance as a woman struggling to keep her dreams despite brutal realities". She was also nominated for the Genie Award for Best Actress.
caption: Zinta at an awards ceremony in 2007
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