He can now attract American stars such as Bacall, Kidman, James Caan, Dafoe, Glover and Ben Gazzara, not to mention European idols Catherine Deneuve and Bj? "Some of these stars have their own games," he laughs "You ask them and, strangely enough, some of them say yes. With a female actor, I think that they think I can do some good for them in terms of their career." Surely Hollywood divas are not queuing up to be shackled, gang-raped and offed in another of Von Trier's "martyrdom of the innocent" scenarios? That said, Kidman's performance as Grace in Dogville was arguably her best so far, although she declined to sign up for the second instalment.Is it the impression of vulnerability that attracts him time and again to marginal characters like romantic idealists, immigrants and people with mental illnesses and disabilities? "With the foreigners, and also the idiots, it's that they are spices, somehow, to our lives," Von Trier replies "They are not necessary. The family was "intellectual, liberal - we could question anything we wanted to, and did". During the slaughter of Partition in 1947, when her uncle helped Muslim friends escape to Pakistan, she was mocked by other Hindus in class for being "too broadminded.
But having a foot in East and West allows you to see the world from all points of view."The "inequality of men and women was a great irritant" - though two of her aunts were among the first women at Delhi university in the 1920s. One ancestor was finance minister to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and the men were scholars of court Persian and Sanskrit.Under the Raj, the sisters went to convent schools, and their father listened to the BBC, though, a Congress party member, he took Madhur to India Gate in 1947, to see Nehru and Mountbatten in an open carriage for the final lowering of the Union Flag She says that "it was, and wasn't, a westernised family My mother didn't speak a word of English. The family was "Hindu by origin but heavily veneered with Muslim culture and English education". Of her three daughters, Zia is a writer and journalist, author of The Invisibles (1996); Meera a teacher and fluent Mandarin speaker; and Sakina an actor, finishing her first screenplay.While the memoir reveals a privileged family that lived in neighbouring mansions and ate together ("it didn't occur to me that families came in sizes smaller than 30 people"), it is also Indian history in microcosm, with the accretion of conquest and languages over the centuries.
By her time, they were spinning for Mahatma Gandhi and trooping out of the cinema when God Save the King came on. They were Kayasthas, or high-caste "free-thinking warrior-scribes". Others thought the lead, Felicity Kendal, should have won."The house where Madhur Bahadur was born in 1933, the fifth of six children, was built, along with others, by her barrister grandfather on a swathe of orchard land, bought through a reward for services to the British during the 1857 Mutiny. Though scornful of caste, she notes that both I and my brother Rohit are journalists, and likes to think that ancestral worship of quill and ink is "in the genes". The trophy rested briefly on our mantlepiece in Chiswick when I was small. Now I learn she was thrilled, but felt she didn't deserve it: "I was only supporting actress. "He asked me to lunch, then sent a huge bunch of roses to me in London," after she won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival for her role as a Bollywood coquette in Merchant Ivory's Shakespeare Wallah.
