POPULAR actress Katrina Kaif has become the latest Indian star to join the Bollywood line-up at the UK's prestigious Madame Tussauds in London.
The British-Indian beauty unveiled her £150,000 life-size wax statue and joined the new Bollywood setting as part of the popular wax-work museum's “15 years of Bollywood” celebration.
After coming face-to-face with her wax model, 31-year-old Katrina said: “This is amazing it does look really like me.”
“Our world famous sculptors have worked closely with the Indian film industry over the last decade, and we now have a stellar line-up in a specially created Bollywood area – one of the most popular in the attraction,” Madame Tussauds, hailed as London's premier tourist attraction, said in a statement.
Katrina, born to a British mother and Kashmiri father, was picked after she went head to head with competitors Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone to win a hotly-contested online poll last year conducted by Madame Tussauds, together with Panjab Radio, in which over 225,000 votes were cast.
She has become the seventh Bollywood actor to be honoured with a figure at Madame Tussauds London and joins the league of actors like Amitabh Bachchan (2000), Aishwarya Rai (2004), Shah Rukh Khan (2007), Salman Khan (2008), Hrithik Roshan
(2011) and Madhuri Dixit-Nene (2012).
“Katrina collaborated closely with the Madame Tussauds artistic team to ensure total accuracy and is delighted with the figure, which is portrayed in a dancing pose wearing a beautiful sequined white, silver and gold, two piece outfit,” a museum spokesperson said.
Katrina's figure was created by a team of 20 sculptors and artists over a four-month period, using hundreds of precise measurements taken at a sitting in Mumbai and cost £150,000/$223,117 to create.
Madame Tussauds Studios London has been making wax figures for over 150 years with each masterpiece taking up to four months and a team of 20 dedicated sculptors to create.
Over 500 precise body measurements are referenced, real head hairs are inserted one by one, and countless layers of paints and tints are applied to build up skin tones to achieve a kind of astonishing realism that visitors flock to see from around the world.
The Bollywood factor has proved extremely lucrative, with Indian holidaymakers and NRIs forming a large chunk of the visitor numbers at one of London's most popular tourist spots.
