Shabana Akhtar Bakhsh

Despite having already performed with the Scottish Youth Theatre, Shabana Bakhsh applied for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama with a certain trepidation, as her parents were not keen on her becoming an actress and upsetting her Glasgow Pakistani community. However, Bakhsh soon began making her way in theatre and, in 2002, she was cast as Zara Malik in the BBC Scottish soap "River City." Set in the fictional town of Shieldinch, it focused on the everyday lives of the residents of Montego Street, with Zara enduring racist bullying before she ran away to Aberdeen. Similar themes were explored as Bakhsh played Yasmeela Khan in "Glasgow Dreams," Christopher Timothy's contribution to "The Afternoon Play" series. She would reunite with Timothy in the long-running medical soap "Doctors," which was set in the imaginary Midland town of Letherbridge. This time, she played the strait-laced Tasha Verma, who was planning to have her unborn baby adopted when she lost it in an explosion at the Riverside surgery. In 2004, Bakhsh made her feature debut in Ken Loach's Glaswegian drama "Ae Fond Kiss," in which she was again cast as a teenager of Pakistani origin being bullied at school and manipulated by her conservative family. However, she was soon back on the small screen as English teacher Jasmine Koreshi, who has a relationship with PE master Rob Cleaver (Elyes Gabel) in "Waterloo Road." She returned to cinema in 2011, as a nurse opposite Ewan McGregor and Eva Green in the mystery virus drama "Perfect Sense."