News quickly spread a while ago that this 19-year-old was Ram Gopal Varma's latest muse who was making her debut opposite Amitabh Bachchan. This was followed by controversies about her parentage, with a tabloid claiming her to be Aamir Khan's stepsister. The debutante actress was making news for a variety of reasons....

Jiah Khan claims to have harboured acting ambitions since she was a toddler. "My mom tells me that even as a two-year-old, I would pretend to have conversations on a fake phone. I craved attention so much, I guess, I just had to be here," she says. The Bollywood bug bit her when she watched Varma's Rangeela. "I also watched films by Karan Johar, Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Mani Ratnam, never dreaming that I would be working with one of them," she says. The way it happened seems to be straight out of a film script itself. Jiah was studying at New York's Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and, as part of her curriculum, had to interview some Bollywood directors. She came to Mumbai and managed to meet Varma. "It was a short rendezvous and he was very polite," she reminisces.

The twist came when Jiah returned to New York and Varma sent her a text message asking her to see him again. "Intrigued, I took a flight back," she says. The maverick director offered her Nishabd. She accepted as she felt that she was 'born to play this role.' Dismissing any similarities between her Nishabd and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, she claims to have read the book thrice: "I think Lolita is manipulative and evil. RGV has treated Nishabd as a beautiful love story with no sexual connotations."

When Varma informed her whom she would be working with, Jiah though he was joking. She remembers the first meeting with Bachchan vividly. "I had oiled my hair and was looking my worst when RGV introduced us. My hands were shaking. But he spoke to me for two hours on random topics and that really calmed me down," she says.

Nishabd has hardly been a cakewalk for her. The intense emotional scenes apart, there was also the problem of her diction. "Though my mom is from Lucknow and she has been teaching me Urdu, yet while shooting I would mess it up. Mr Bachchan had to correct me all the time," she says. "He taught me acting all over again…whatever I learnt at acting school just went out of the window...."