77 Facts About Madhur Jaffrey

Madhur Jaffrey CBE is an Indian-born British-American actress, cookbook and travel writer, and television personality.

Madhur Jaffrey is recognized for bringing Indian cuisine to the western hemisphere with her debut cookbook, An Invitation to Indian Cooking, which was inducted into the James Beard Foundation's Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2006.

Madhur Jaffrey has written over a dozen cookbooks and appeared on several related television programmes, the most notable of which was Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery, which premiered in the UK in 1982.

Madhur Jaffrey was the food consultant at the now-closed Dawat, which was considered by many food critics to be among the best Indian restaurants in New York City.

Madhur Jaffrey was instrumental in bringing together filmmakers James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, and acted in several of their films, such as Shakespeare Wallah, for which she won the Silver Bear for Best Actress award at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.

Madhur Jaffrey has appeared in dramas on radio, stage and television.

Madhur Jaffrey is the fifth of six children of Lala Raj Bans Bahadur and his wife, Kashmiran Rani.

When Madhur Jaffrey was about two years old, her father accepted a position in a family-run concern, Ganesh Flour Mills, and moved to Kanpur as the manager of a vanaspati ghee factory there.

In Kanpur, Madhur Jaffrey attended St Mary's Convent School along with her elder sisters, Lalit and Kamal.

In Delhi, Madhur Jaffrey attended Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School where her history teacher, Mrs McKelvie, encouraged her to participate in school plays.

Madhur Jaffrey played the role of Titania in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream followed by the lead role in Robin Hood and His Merry Men.

Every winter, St Stephen's students put on a Shakespearean play that Madhur Jaffrey would watch avidly from the front row.

In 1947, Madhur Jaffrey experienced first-hand the effects of the partition of India.

Madhur Jaffrey found Punjabi food's simplicity and freshness very enticing and routinely picked up tandoori food from Moti Mahal for family picnics.

At school, the subject of domestic science included learning dishes like blancmange, whose bland taste drove Madhur Jaffrey to dismiss the cookery lessons as preparing "British invalid foods from circa 1930".

Madhur Jaffrey did her best but guessed that she failed the subject of domestic science altogether.

Meanwhile, Madhur Jaffrey's father had moved to Daurala as general manager of Daurala Sugar Works, a factory owned by family friends, the Shri Ram family.

Madhur Jaffrey took part in her college's all-women productions of Hamlet and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Madhur Jaffrey appeared in The Comedy of Errors performed by St Stephen's College.

In 1951, Madhur Jaffrey joined the Unity Theatre, an English language repertory company founded by Saeed Madhur Jaffrey in New Delhi.

Madhur Jaffrey auditioned for the role of the Queen's Reader in Jean Cocteau's play The Eagle Has Two Heads just four days before the opening and was cast in the role.

Madhur Jaffrey answered a casting call by Prawer Jhabvala and worked with her on All India Radio plays.

The protagonists of Prawer Jhabvala's first novel, To Whom She Will, a young couple who work at a radio station in Delhi and fall in love, were based on Madhur and Saeed Jaffrey.

In early 1955, Madhur Jaffrey was in the audience at St Stephen's College, Delhi, for a programme of literary readings by Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, married English actors who toured internationally in Shakespearean productions.

Later that year, the Unity Theatre put on a performance of Tennessee Williams' one-act play, Auto-da-Fe, in which Madhur Jaffrey played the rigidly moralistic mother to Saeed's young postal worker, Eloi.

The last play that Madhur Jaffrey did with Saeed was Othello in which Saeed was cast as Iago while Madhur Jaffrey played Iago's wife, Emilia.

Madhur Jaffrey won a grant from the British government that she could use to pay for education at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Madhur Jaffrey joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with Diana Rigg, Sian Phillips and Glenda Jackson as her contemporaries.

Madhur Jaffrey won a scholarship from RADA after an audition.

Madhur Jaffrey picked up minor acting roles on BBC television and radio.

Madhur Jaffrey rented rooms from at least two different landlords before settling down in a bedsit in Brent with a young Jewish family, the Golds, who allowed her to use their kitchen and their utensils to cook her own food.

Madhur Jaffrey found British food and Indian restaurants of that time to be terrible.

Madhur Jaffrey wrote to her mother, begging her for recipes of the home cooked meals of her childhood.

Madhur Jaffrey's mother responded with recipes written in Hindi on onionskin paper in letters sent via airmail.

Madhur Jaffrey bought pumpernickel from a neighborhood Jewish bakery as a substitute for chapatis.

In late 1955, Saeed Madhur Jaffrey won a Fulbright scholarship to study drama in America the following year.

Madhur Jaffrey refused but gave him a tour of RADA where she pointed out English actors, such as Peter O'Toole, whom she thought would soon have a high profile in the profession.

The next day, they travelled to New York City where Madhur Jaffrey got a job as a tour guide to the United Nations, while Saeed did public relations work for the Government of India Tourist Office.

Between 1959 and 1963, Madhur Jaffrey and Saeed had three daughters: Meera, Zia and Sakina.

Madhur Jaffrey himself wanted to produce plays and make movies.

In 1962, Madhur Jaffrey and Saeed appeared in Rolf Forsberg's Off-Broadway production of A Tenth of an Inch Makes The Difference.

Madhur Jaffrey arranged for their children to live with her parents and sister in Delhi while Madhur Jaffrey went to Mexico for the formal divorce proceedings.

Madhur Jaffrey visited to India for the shooting of Shakespeare Wallah.

Madhur Jaffrey returned to New York City when the film was screened at the New York Film Festival.

Madhur Jaffrey persuaded Claiborne to profile Jaffrey as an actress who could cook.

When Claiborne agreed, Madhur Jaffrey borrowed a friend's apartment in which to meet him since she felt she could not do so in the one-bedroom apartment on Eleventh Street that she shared with Allen.

Madhur Jaffrey rearranged the furniture in the borrowed apartment and made stuffed green peppers, koftas in sour cream and cucumber raita.

In 1967, Madhur Jaffrey traveled to India to attend a black-tie premiere of Shakespeare Wallah in Delhi hosted by the British High Commissioner to India, John Freeman and his wife, Catherine.

At the premiere she met Marlon Brando, an actor Madhur Jaffrey admired deeply for his method acting technique.

Later that year, Madhur Jaffrey shot scenes for Merchant Ivory's next film, The Guru.

In 1969, Madhur Jaffrey married Sanford Allen, who at the time was a violinist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Madhur Jaffrey was instrumental in introducing James Ivory and Ismail Merchant to each other.

When Madhur Jaffrey travelled to India for the shooting of Shakespeare Wallah, her first shots were in Kasauli, a hill station.

Madhur Jaffrey went on to act in further Merchant Ivory films like The Guru, Autobiography of a Princess, Heat and Dust, directed by Ivory, and The Perfect Murder.

Madhur Jaffrey starred as the title character in their film Cotton Mary and co-directed it with Merchant.

Madhur Jaffrey has appeared in Six Degrees of Separation, Vanya on 42nd Street, Flawless and Prime.

Madhur Jaffrey starred alongside Deborah Kerr in the 1985 movie The Assam Garden.

Madhur Jaffrey appeared as the older version of the Indian super heroine character Celsius, in her civilian identity Arani Desai, in a 2019 episode of the DC Universe series Doom Patrol.

In 2004, Madhur Jaffrey appeared in Bombay Dreams on Broadway, where she played the main character's grandmother.

Madhur Jaffrey is the author of cookbooks of Indian, Asian, and world vegetarian cuisines.

Madhur Jaffrey had almost never been in the kitchen and almost failed cooking at school.

Madhur Jaffrey's editor Judith Jones claimed in her memoirs that Jaffrey was an ideal cookbook writer precisely because she had learned to cook childhood comfort food as an adult, and primarily from written instructions.

Madhur Jaffrey started compiling all the recipes learnt by her through correspondence with her mother and adapted for the American kitchen.

Madhur Jaffrey took the book to her friend, Ved Mehta, who in turn mentioned it to publisher Andre Schiffrin.

Judith Jones snapped up the book immediately, only asking Madhur Jaffrey to add serving suggestions and menus for people not familiar with Indian cooking.

Madhur Jaffrey was hired by the BBC to present a show on Indian cooking.

Madhur Jaffrey has three daughters from her marriage to Saeed Madhur Jaffrey: Zia, Meera and Sakina.

Zia Madhur Jaffrey is a part-time assistant professor of Creative Writing at The New School in New York City.

Madhur Jaffrey has written for newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Madhur Jaffrey's work has appeared in magazines like The Nation, Vogue, and Elle.

Madhur Jaffrey is the author of The Invisibles: A Tale of Eunuchs of India that explores the hijra community, whom she first encountered at a family wedding in Delhi in 1984.

Meera Madhur Jaffrey graduated from Oberlin College, Ohio, with a major in Chinese studies.

Madhur Jaffrey teaches in the Music Department of the Learning Community Charter School in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Sakina Madhur Jaffrey picked up her love of Chinese culture from her elder sister, Meera.

Madhur Jaffrey graduated from Vassar College, New York with a major in Chinese studies and lived in Taiwan in her twenties.

Madhur Jaffrey is an actress, best known for her role as Linda Vasquez in the American television series House of Cards.

Madhur Jaffrey is cousin to the late Raghu Raj Bahadur, considered to be one of the world's top theoretical statisticians, and his sister, the late Sheila Dhar.