Slumdog star Pinto on a roll

Freida Pinto thought dealing with reporters and photographers at big movie premieres would be a breeze after her experience on her first red carpet two years ago at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"There was not a single soul on the red carpet for Slumdog Millionaire. Just a photographer and one person doing the interview," said Pinto, who came to the festival an unknown and left a rising star after the movie shot from obscurity to win the festival's audience award for favourite film on its way to Academy Awards triumph and box-office success.

"I was nervous about facing a million people for the first time, so I was like, oh, red carpets are easy. But things have changed since that time," Pinto said during her first return to the festival, where she has two movies playing, Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger and Julian Schnabel's Miral. This time, photographers were awaiting her at Toronto airport, and she has been one of the festival's main glamour girls.

Pinto, 25, was raised in Mumbai and worked as a model and a TV host before making her screen debut in Slumdog. She has been working almost nonstop since co-starring in the Greek mythology action tale Immortals and a Planet of the Apes prequel, Rise of the Apes. In December, she begins filming the Middle East oil drama Black Thirst. Pinto has the title role in Miral, due in cinemas this December, playing a Palestinian teen coming of age in war-torn East Jerusalem.

In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which opens next Wednesday, Allen cast Pinto as a new neighbour to a conflicted writer (Josh Brolin) in a stale marriage with an art-gallery assistant (Naomi Watts).

"We wanted somebody who he looked out the window at, who was an obscure object of desire. We wondered who could it be? He's married to Watts, who is so beautiful and such a wonderful actress.

What could lure a guy from Watts? Nothing really," Allen said.

Then someone suggested Pinto, whom he had seen in Slumdog. Allen said he set up a meeting and hired her. He kept her in wide shots in her early scenes so the audience saw her only from a distance until she sits down in a res- taurant opposite Brolin.

"You see that face close up over the table, and that face is pulverising. She's beautiful," Allen said.

Pinto, whose father is a retired bank officer and mother is a school principal, said she decided at a young age that she wanted to act.

"My mom and my sister would sometimes catch me in front of the mirror, just being dramatic, imitating characters I had seen in a film or on television. Doing funny voices," Pinto said. "They'd laugh at me, but they'd always say, 'You know what? You're going to do exactly this when you grow up. You're going to be in show business.'"