How an Australian stuntwoman conquered Indian action films

Key Facts

Actress and stuntwoman Mary Ann Evans, best known by her stage name Fearless Nadia, took the Indian film industry by storm in 1935 when she appeared in the Hindi film Hunterwali (The Woman with a Whip).
Image source, Alamy Image caption, Fearless Nadia took the Indian film industry by storm in 1935 when she appeared in Hunterwali (The Woman With a Whip) Wadia initially cast her in small roles in films produced by his studio Wadia Movietone, which he ran with his brother Homi.
"The financiers of the film were quite horrified that these Parsi brothers would star a blonde, blue-eyed, white woman in a film where she was wearing hot pants and leather vests and carrying a whip and basically beating up all these bad guys in the film," Roy Wadia says.
Image source, Film and Television Institute of India Image caption, Fearless Nadia was perhaps the first foreigner to attain cult status in Bollywood "The roles she played, and the screenplays that my grandfather created for her, were about emancipation, about the freedom struggle, about literacy, about anti-corruption - all themes that were particularly relevant at that time of huge social change and turmoil [of the Indian Independence movement]," says Roy Wadia.