Digitalk

“Life isn’t all haha hehe.”

- Meera Syal, British-Indian Writer and Actress

Born on the 27th June 1963, today is Meera Syal’s 44th Birthday!

Meera Syal is a British comedian, writer, playwright, singer, journalist and actress, rising to prominence as one of the team that created Goodness Gracious Me and becoming one of the UK’s best-known Indian personalities. She was awarded the MBE in the New Year’s Honours List of 1997.

Syal won the National Student Drama Award for writing One of Us while studying English and Drama at Manchester University. She spent seven years working for the Royal Court Theatre and won the Betty Trask Award for her first book Anita and Me and the Media Personality of the Year award at the Commission for Racial Equality’s annual Race in the Media awards in 2000. Syal wrote the screenplay for the 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach. She was one of the team who wrote and performed in the BBC comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me (1996-2001), originally on radio and then transferred to television. In 2003, she was listed in The Observer as one of the fifty funniest acts in British comedy.

As a journalist she writes occasionally for The Guardian. She scored a number one record with Gareth Gates and her co-stars from The Kumars at No. 42 with Spirit in the Sky, the Comic Relief single. She also sang Then He Kissed Me (composed by Biddu) with the famous pop star from Pakistan Nazia Hassan. Nazia, Meera and Biddu also came up with the girl band named “Saffron” in 1988. She was given the Nazia Hassan Foundation award in 2003.

In June 2003 she appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme with a selection of music by Nitin Sawhney, Madan Bala Sindhu, Joni Mitchell, Pizzicato Five, Sukhwinder Singh, Louis Armstrong and others. The luxury she chose to ease her life as a castaway was a piano.

Links:

1) Text Reference:Meera Syal

2) To find out more about Meera Syal click here.

3) Image Courtesy by Onasia Images Collection

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Quote o' the Day, Who, What, Where, When, Why. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.