The actress rose to fame in the early noughties

Parminder Nagra takes centre stage in ITV's latest police drama, DI Ray, playing the titular character, DI Rachita Ray, a homicide detective working on a murder investigation in Birmingham. 

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Viewers of the series may be wondering who the actress is and where they may have seen her before. Read on to find out more about the new ITV star.

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Who is Parminder Nagra?

Parminder Nagra is a 46-year-old actress who was born in Leicester in 1975 and is of Indian Punjabi descent.

She rose to fame playing Jess Bhamra in the 2002 film, , alongside Kiera Knightley. 

The actress married photographer James Stenson in 2009 and welcomed a son named Kai the same year. The pair divorced four years later in 2013. 

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What has Parminder Nagra been in? 

After shooting to stardom in , Parminder landed a role in the NBC medical drama series, playing Dr Neela Rasgotra from 2003 to 2009. She went on to star in the first season of NBC crime drama series as Meera Malik. The actress also appeared as Ellen Nadeer in season four of Marvel series, . 

Parminder is best known for playing Jess in

Viewers may recognise Parminder for her role as Dr Lapham in Netflix's 2018 film, , as well as for her parts in many major TV series, including Netflix's as Counselor Priya Singh, as Dr Wen and as Arch-Marshall Rebecca Harper.

Chatting about playing her first lead role in a TV drama during an appearance on recently, the actress revealed that it's one of the hardest things she's done. "Yeah I think normally when you're doing a series which you've done before you do one episode at a time, so you'll do episode one, episode two et cetera," she explained.

Parminder stars in ITV's 

"In this, we were shooting four episodes so four hours of TV all in one go. So in the morning, you could be doing something for episode four and in the afternoon you could be doing something from episode one."

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