Preity Zinta: Basketball Court to IPL Team Owner
Preity Zinta played school basketball, trained for Ishkq in Paris and co-owns Punjab Kings. Her career, per her biography.
Sport runs through Preity Zinta's Wikipedia biography. She played basketball at school, trained with a celebrity coach for a role, and since 2008 has co-owned a cricket team. This piece follows that thread and keeps to what the biography states.
An army family in Shimla
According to the biography, Zinta was born on 31 January 1975 in a Hindu Rajput family from Shimla district, Himachal Pradesh. Her father, Durganand Zinta, was an officer in the Indian Army, and she says his military background left her with a lasting sense of discipline and punctuality. She describes herself as a tomboy as a child and studied at the Convent of Jesus and Mary boarding school in Shimla, where in her free time she played sports, especially basketball. She also developed a love of literature, particularly Shakespeare and poetry.
Degrees and a chance advertisement
She studied at St. Bede's College in Shimla, graduating with an English honours degree, and then took a postgraduate degree in criminal psychology. She took up modelling after a chance meeting at a friend's birthday party in 1996 with a director who persuaded her to audition for a Perk chocolates commercial. She also appeared in an advertisement for Liril soap.
Films
Her acting debut came with Dil Se (1998), followed by Soldier the same year, which together won her the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut. She was recognised for playing a teenage single mother in Kya Kehna (2000). In 2003 she led three of India's highest-grossing films of the year, The Hero, Koi... Mil Gaya and Kal Ho Naa Ho, and won the Filmfare Award for Best Actress for the last. Veer-Zaara (2004) and Salaam Namaste (2005) followed. For Lakshya (2004) she modelled her TV journalist role on the reporter Barkha Dutt, watching her shows and reading books on the Kargil conflict. For Heroes (2008) she attended Anupam Kher's acting school to learn a Punjabi woman's dialect. She has won two Filmfare Awards from ten nominations and has acted in over 30 films.
Training for Paris
After Heaven on Earth, she took a two-year break, later explaining that she had chosen to focus on her cricket team. In 2011 she launched PZNZ Media. Her first film under the banner, Ishkq in Paris (2013), required her to learn French and follow a strict diet and fitness regime, for which she hired the celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson. The film bombed at the box office and received mostly negative reviews, though her performance attracted some praise.
The cricket team
Zinta and partners including Ness Wadia and Mohit Burman acquired the Mohali-based IPL team in 2008 for 76 million dollars, naming it Kings XI Punjab. It was renamed Punjab Kings in 2021. Until 2009 she was the only woman to own an IPL team and was the league's youngest owner. She has helped launch ticket sales and promote the team, and said: "My involvement with the team is total." In September 2017 she became owner of the Stellenbosch Kings in South Africa's Mzansi Super League.
Other work
She wrote a series of columns for BBC News Online South Asia in 2004-05, and has worked with causes including UNODC's campaign against human trafficking and the Godfrey Phillips National Bravery Movement.
A note on sources
The biography records legal proceedings and relationship coverage that this article leaves out. Her training for Paris is the only fitness regime it names, and it gives no details of the programme, so none are described.
Sources
*Cover photo: Laura Lee Dooley, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).*