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Exclusive Interview
Cooking Guru Madhur Jaffrey Makes Brief EastEnders Stop
By Larry Jaffee
Sometimes EastEnders actors are cast as characters that turn out to
make only brief appearances, yet their real-life backgrounds
overshadow whatever footnote contributions they have made to the
series. Anthony Newley, Hywell Bennett and Susan George come to mind.
An award-winning actress since the mid-1960s on both sides of the
Atlantic in film, stage and television, Madhur Jaffrey falls into this
category. She starred on Broadway in Bombay Dreams in 2004, and had
guest appearances in the U.S. police dramas Law & Order: Criminal
Intent and Special Victims Unit, as well as the Hollywood films
Flawless with Robert De Niro, Six Degrees of Separation with Donald
Sutherland and Prime with Meryl Streep.
But she’s perhaps best known for her Indian cooking and as the author
of more than 15 cookbooks, the latest being At Home with Madhur
Jaffrey, published in October by Alfred A. Knopf.
In an exclusive interview with the Walford Gazette, Jaffrey talks
about her dual careers, her time on EastEnders and the quality of
Indian food in the U.S. and Britain.
Jaffrey was brought in to be Pushpa, the estranged ex-wife of Dan
Ferreira (played by Bollywood veteran actor Dalip Tahil). She appeared
in a half-dozen EastEnders episodes, mostly dealing with her character
maintaining secret relationships with her grown children, but
culminating in an explosive wedding scene. Dan’s date Shirley
accidentally meets Pushpa in the ladies’ room, and realises she is not
dead, as Dan had led her to believe. I think that the episode, which
WLIW broadcast in mid-October, ranks among EastEnders’ best.
Although Jaffrey maintains homes in Manhattan and upstate New York,
she wasn’t aware that her EastEnders episodes were being watched in
the U.S. – seven years after those scenes were aired in the U.K.
“Somebody just told me. I was very surprised.” She recalls the 2003
experience as if it was yesterday.
“I had such a wonderful time. The kids who played my children were
young Londoners and were such fun to work with,” says Jaffrey, who’s
eager to share some behind-the-scenes information about what went on
during the “big wedding banquet, which was shot at a wonderful home in
the country over three or four days.”
She explains that the same real food had been placed on tables, and
was not moved the next day nor the day after that (not for reasons of
economy but of continuity). “They wanted us to pretend we were
eating…. [The spoiled food’s odour was so bad] that it was like
sitting in front of a garbage truck. The awful smells were assaulting
our nostrils.”
Jaffrey says she thinks Tahil’s real-life immigration problems might
have diminished her role, which she would have been interested in
expanding. With Tahil no longer available, “they had to fade out my
character,” she notes. EastEnders ended up rewriting 40 scripts.
Pushpa Ferreira’s backstory involves her leaving Dan for his best
friend. At the time of her casting, Jaffrey explained in an online
chat with readers of The Independent, “I really wanted to do the
[EastEnders] role because Indian women are usually portrayed as so
proper and withdrawn – the kind of women who just stay at home cooking
and cleaning. I thought, ‘How wonderful of EastEnders to write a
character that is realistic’. What my character has done happens all
the time in India; there are all kinds of stories of people running
away and marrying their lovers. This is what commonly happens in those
places, but somehow the image of Indian womanhood is different.”
In that same interview, she was asked what the food is like in the
EastEnders canteen, to which she responded: “It’s fine. But I don’t
know why the BBC canteen doesn’t take advice from the corporation’s
wonderful cooking programmes. The food is OK, but it is not food that
you hunger for.”
Jaffrey tells the Walford Gazette she thinks the Ferreira family was
unfairly slammed by critics for not being an “authentic” Indian
family. “Goans are real Indians. Some are mixed race.”
Of the series, which she would have been all in favour of continuing,
she reflects: “I wanted to do EastEnders,” and that the show
approached her U.K. agent. She also has one in the U.S., as well as
literary agents in both countries.
Besides EastEnders, Jaffrey’s acting has run the gamut from police
shows to Bollywood. In addition to the new book, she is promoting a
new comedy film, Today’s Special, starring The Daily Show’s Aasif
Mandvi, opening in the U.S. nationwide on 19 November. Jaffrey plays
the mother of Mandvi’s character, Samir, a Manhattan chef who
rediscovers his heritage and his passion for life through the
enchanting art of cooking Indian food. The role allows Jaffrey to
marry her two passions: acting and cooking.
Jaffrey says she’s “involved” in the Manhattan Indian restaurant
Dawat, where she occasionally cooks as well as helps out with the
menu. Coincidentally, the Walford Gazette in June 2001 assembled a
small group of fans for a dinner party there in honour of Wendy
Richard.
Jaffrey says that Indian restaurants in New York are as good as in
London, and the same is true in major cities in both countries. “There
is now a much better grade of restaurants. Previously, everyone had
the same menu.”
She agrees that curry has become the “national dish” of Britain. “It
started with young people looking for a cheap meal, something spicy so
they could have a lot to drink with it.”
Not surprisingly, the British title of her new book is Curry Easy,
which is a marketing strategy by her publisher. “I’m not the best
person to know what sells.”
Queen Elizabeth II awarded Jaffrey a CBE (Commander of the British
Empire) for “her services to drama and promotion of appreciation for
Indian food and culture.”
For Jaffrey, “cooking is soothing: it’s a means to an end. If I’m
upset, it calms me down. I eat a very good meal for myself.” She also
loves to entertain. “I do it all the time.” Her present husband,
Sanford Allen, to whom she has been married since 1969, is a violinist
with the New York Philharmonic. They support each other’s artistic
endeavours. (Her first husband, Saeed Jaffrey, whom she divorced in
1965, appeared for a short time as Ravi Desai on EastEnders’ rival,
Coronation Street.)
With cooking shows all the rage on television, Jaffrey clearly
wouldn’t mind being asked to host of one of her own, and she
occasionally makes appearances on other programmes. In 1982 Jaffrey’s
eight-part cookery series for BBC Television, Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian
Cookery, were aired nationally in the U.K., where it has been repeated
at least five times and also shown at least twice in the U.S.,
Ireland, most of Western Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
Earlier this year, she co-starred in a film Hiding Divya, in which she
played Divya, a suburban New Jersey-based Indian-American woman
battling mental illness following the death of her common-law husband.
According to The New York Times review: “Divya has episodes: she
retreats into herself, stays all night in the car with a blank look,
and worse. (At one point she marches around with a carving knife
looking for evil eyes to cut out.)” The Hollywood Reporter cited
Jaffrey’s “fiercely committed performance.”
Proud of her heritage, Jaffrey sees how the success of Indian-themed
films like Slumdog Millionaire and Monsoon Wedding (she wasn’t in
either) has permeated popular culture. “I saw an immediate result:
suddenly there was an Indian character on 24.”
Born in Delhi, Madhur came to Britain aged 19 to study drama at the
Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). An invitation to teach
pantomime brought her to the U.S. in 1957, where she worked at St.
Michael’s Playhouse, Winooski, Vermont. From there she went to New
York in search of work in the theatre. She began writing food articles
to boost her income.
Circa 1961, Jaffrey ran in the same circles as future film partners
Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. In fact, she introduced them to each
other; they repaid her by often casting her in the Merchant-Ivory
productions including Shakespeare Wallah (1964), The Guru (1969),
Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Heat and Dust (1983) and Cotton
Mary (1999), the last of which she co-directed with Merchant.
“We were all very young,” she says of their early New York days. “We
were all dreamers. Ismail was a student at NYU (New York University).
He once turned to me and told how he wanted to make Radio City
musicals and plays. James, an American, dreamed of going to India. We
met very often at my apartment. I could cook.”
But according to her book, Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a
Childhood in India, published in 2006, “When I left India to study in
England, I could not cook at all. But my palate had already recorded
millions of flavours. From cumin to ginger, they were all in my head,
waiting to be called into service.”
