Firdous Bamji

Firdous Bamji is an Indian-born actor and writer, born on May 3, 1966, in Bombay, India, to a Zoroastrian Parsi family then residing in Bahrain. His father, Esadvaster, worked as the regional representative for Norwich Union Life Insurance Society, while his mother, Roshan, was a homemaker; both parents were active in civic organizations. Bamji attended St. Christopher's School in Bahrain, a British private school, until the age of ten, after which he and his two brothers were sent to Kodaikanal International School, an American boarding school situated in the mountains of South India.

Bamji pursued higher education at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and subsequently at the University of South Carolina, where he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism and a Master of Fine Arts. During his undergraduate years he began acting at Trustus, the first professional theatre in Columbia, South Carolina, under the guidance of artistic director Jim Thigpen. His roles there included Pale in Burn This, Torch in Beirut, Danny in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Peter Patrone in The Heidi Chronicles, and all parts in Eric Bogosian's solo work Drinking in America. He later completed his MFA as an apprentice at The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.

In 1994, Bamji was cast in Bogosian's SubUrbia at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater, a production that prompted him and his then wife, Erin Thigpen, to relocate to New York City. His stage work has since taken him to theaters in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, as well as major regional theaters across the United States. He has performed leading roles in world and American premieres of plays by Tom Stoppard, Tony Kushner, Naomi Wallace, Rebecca Gilman, and Eric Bogosian. His Broadway credits include The King and I, in which he appeared in 1996.

In 2007, director Simon McBurney invited Bamji to co-write and perform in a new production with the British company Complicité. The work centered on the relationship between mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and Cambridge University don G. H. Hardy. Bamji had already been developing a film script on the subject when McBurney approached him. The resulting production, A Disappearing Number, won the Laurence Olivier Award, the Critics Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play, and the Evening Standard Award for Best Play. Over the following four years the production toured Europe, Australia, India, and the United States before concluding its run at the Novello Theatre in London's West End. In 2015, Bamji received an Obie Award for his performance in Roundabout Theatre's production of Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink.

His screen credits include the films The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Analyze That, Ashes, Justice, and The War Within, the last of which earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination in 2005. His television work includes appearances on Law & Order and Law & Order SVU. Bamji has also narrated more than twenty audiobooks, among them The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Camille by Alexandre Dumas, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, Six Graves to Munich by Mario Puzo, and The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie, for which he received an Audie Award nomination in 2009.

Bamji lives in London with his partner, British actress Hayley Mills, whom he met while the two toured America together in the lead roles of The King and I in 1997.