Persis Khambatta

Persis Khambatta shaved her head on camera in 1978. It was not an aesthetic whim but a contract requirement to join the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That image of an Indian woman with a polished scalp made the rounds in newsrooms across half the planet.

Before moving to Los Angeles, she won the Miss India pageant at just sixteen years old. Her face was already plastered across the streets of Bombay thanks to a soap ad campaign that launched her to national fame. But she was looking for something more than being a face in cosmetics commercials.

Her commitment to science fiction required her to give up her long hair.

In 1975, she appeared in The Wilby Conspiracy alongside Michael Caine and Sidney Poitier. It was a necessary first step into the international market. Three years later came the defining opportunity to play Lieutenant Ilia.

The stigma of silver baldness

Filming under Robert Wise was grueling because of the makeup sessions. Persis had to wear a rubber cap for months to hide her shaved head off the set. And although critics were harsh on the film, her physical presence proved more striking than the script itself.

The industry chews up new faces.

In 1981, she shared the screen with Sylvester Stallone in Nighthawks. She played a terrorist in a thriller that performed well at the U.S. box office. But offers started to dry up because casting directors only saw her in exotic-type roles.

Hollywood didn't know what to do with her.

She appeared in B-movies such as Warrior of the Lost World in 1983 and Megaforce a year earlier. These were projects that paid the bills but did not tap into her dramatic potential. So she decided to return to her roots in search of the relevance America had denied her.

Back to Bombay and Final Legacy

She permanently returned to India in the late 1980s. In 1997, she published the book Pride of India, which took years of research and interviews. It was a massive volume dedicated to Indian women who had achieved success abroad.

Her interest was always in opening doors for those who came after her. She invested much of her savings in the printing of that work to ensure superior print quality (a detail that nearly left her bankrupt).

She died in 1998 at a hospital in Bombay after suffering a massive heart attack. She was forty-nine years old. The medical report recorded her death just hours after she was admitted with severe chest pain.