Her parents' friends sneered at her dreams of acting, saying it was a ‘low-class' profession. But encouraged by her mother, Archana ‘Archie' Panjabi refused to listen to them, taking part in film productions like East Is East and Bend It Like Beckham.
Her triumph was complete when she won an Emmy award. Panjabi, 38, declared the honour was "just amazing" as she was named Best Supporting Actress for her role in the The Good Wife. In the hit drama, in which the title character returns to work as a lawyer after her husband is disgraced and jailed, Panjabi plays a cynical private investigator for the law firm.
At the family home in north-west London, her mother Padma said, "I'm very proud. When she was nominated she never really expected to win really. It was one of her dreams to win an Emmy and I am so proud that she has achieved it."
Panjabi's family originated in Pakistan, but left for India after The Partition. In the 1970s they moved to Britain and set up home in Hendon, north-west London. Her father Govind opened a restaurant and her mother Padma became a teacher for children with special needs.
"Since I was a baby my goal was to be on TV because film was impossible. You never got any Asian women in Western cinema," says Panjabi.
"The community was like ‘It's such a low-class profession'. But my mother told me not to listen to anyone. She had been told that she wouldn't be able to teach but she did."
Panjabi was perfectly happy to have an arranged marriage at the age of 26 to bespoke tailor Rajesh Nihalani. "There's a big misconception about arranged marriage," she says, adding that her mother told her, "I'm going to introduce you to someone, if you don't like them, fair enough." She says that at the time"it brought out my rebellious streak becauseI thought her taste in men was not going to be like mine. But at the end of the day, she knows me better than anybody else."
Panjabi talks about her love of fattening curries. "When I was younger I was fat. I was never conscious of it and was content with who I was because I was so loved. My mother never told me to lose weight and my father doted on me, but my agent told me otherwise." She was well into adulthood when she suddenly lost weight, out of shock when her brother Ashwin was left in a coma for three months followinga road accident.
After school - where Panjabi says she was too much of a ‘tough cookie' to suffer racism - she studied management at Brunel University before breaking into acting. She was upset to be rejected for a part in her dream show EastEnders but shortly afterwards she was offered a part in East Is East. That comic film about Asians' struggle to settle in Britain won international acclaim, and she went on to bag Bend it Like Beckham.
More well-regarded performances followed on British television, including an adaptation of the multicultural London novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and in the title role in Yasmin, a drama about how a British Muslim is affected by the September 11 attacks. Hollywood then beckoned. Three years ago Panjabi appeared alongside Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart.
While the actress confesses to having once been "embarrassed" about her mother's saris and other cultural displays, she has now changed, saying: "It's very trendy to be an Indian".
