Art Malik

Athar ul-Haque Malik (born 13 November 1952), known professionally as Art Malik, is an English actor who achieved international fame in the 1980s through his starring and subsidiary roles in assorted British and Merchant Ivory television serials and films. He is especially remembered for his portrayal of the out-of-place Hari Kumar in The Jewel in the Crown at the outset of his career. He also portrayed Islamic extremist Salim Abu Aziz in True Lies.

By Malik's own account, the sudden success he enjoyed in 1984 resulted in his excessive drinking. "I was surrounded by people who admired me and I took all of that home with me," he said when interviewed in 2003. "I paid lots of attention to my ego, and not enough to my spirit. It was totally unhealthy, like an illness." The result was a strain on his marriage, leading to his wife walking out on him. He also ran up high bills on his credit card, and by 1993 he owed £55,000 to the bank and £32,000 to the Inland Revenue, and was on the verge of being declared bankrupt when he landed the lucrative part of Salim Abu Aziz, a terrorist, in James Cameron's True Lies. He and his wife reunited.Malik took a major role in fundraising for relief work for victims of the Gujarat earthquake in 2001, and also appeared on the DEC Pakistan Floods Appeal advertisement in 2010. He lives with his wife Gina Rowe, a fellow student at the Guildhall, whom he married in 1980. They have two daughters, Jessica and Keira. Although from a Muslim background, and having insisted that his character on Holby City should be a Muslim, Malik describes himself as "not a practising Muslim. I'm probably an apostate, and liable for any right-minded Muslim fundamentalist to put me on a list of people to stamp out."

Malik was born Athar ul-Haque Malik in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, the son of Zaibunisa and Mazhar ul-Haque Malik, a doctor who would soon qualify as an ophthalmic surgeon in Britain. When his father secured a job as a surgeon in Moorfields Eye Hospital, Malik was brought to London in 1956, aged three, with his four older brothers. At age 10 he was sent to school in Quetta, Balochistan, for one year, and then Bec Grammar School, a selective state school in Upper Tooting, London. Malik is mildly dyslexic and found academic studies trying; after an unsatisfactory stint of business studies and a term studying acting at the Questors Theatre, he won a scholarship to Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Before long, he was working with the Old Vic and Royal Shakespeare companies, where he played the title role in the Shakespeare play Othello.