Jacqueline Fernandez

Jacqueline Fernandez had previously dated Bahraini prince Hassan bin Rashid Al Khalifa for three years. They had met at a party hosted by a mutual friend in 2008. While she was filming ‘Housefull 2’, she began dating the film’s director Sajid Khan. There were rumours of an impending wedding but they split in May 2013.

Born on August 11, 1985, in Manama, Bahrain, to Elroy and Kim Fernandez, Jacqueline grew up in a multi-ethnic family. Elroy Fernandez, a musician, left his native country Sri Lanka due to the 1980s civil unrest between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Kim, an air hostess, is part Malaysian and part Canadian. After marriage, they settled down in Bahrain. Jacqueline is the youngest of their four children. Besides her, they also have two sons and another daughter.

Fernandez harboured acting aspirations since she was a child and wanted to be a Hollywood star. When she was 14 years old, she began hosting television shows. She received her early education at the Sacred Heart School in Bahrain and later enrolled in the University of Sydney to study mass communication. After she graduated, she moved to Sri Lanka where she began working as a television reporter. She also learned Spanish and refined her French and Arabic at the Berlitz school of languages.

Jacqueline Fernandez has fond memories of the time when she worked as a reporter for a Sri Lankan news channel. As her university education was in the field of investigative journalism, she truly enjoyed her job at the news channel. She has stated that she sometimes still misses her reporting days as it was “adventure every day, coming to work, finding out what the latest news is, working with the team. It was like being a little detective.”

While she was still employed as a reporter, she started accepting modelling gigs. In 2006, she emerged as the winner of the Miss Universe Sri Lanka pageant and subsequently went on to represent Sri Lanka at the world Miss Universe 2006 pageant in Los Angeles. She was a professional model for the next three years and participated in various commercial campaigns.

In 2009, Jacqueline Fernandez travelled to India for a modelling assignment. During her stay, she took acting lessons under British-Indian theatre director Barry John. She later successfully auditioned for the fantasy romance ‘Aladin’, landing the role of the female protagonist, Jasmine. Also starring Amitabh Bachchan, Sahil Khan, Riteish Deshmukh, and Sanjay Dutt, the film was released on October 30, 2009.

The movie was a critical and commercial failure and Fernandez herself received harsh criticism for her acting. Despite this, she was awarded the IIFA Award for Star Debut of the Year – Female for the film.

She shared screen space with Deshmukh once more in her next release, the 2010 science fiction romantic comedy ‘Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai’. She portrayed Tara, an alien girl from Venus who comes to Earth looking for love. This film too was a flop. In fact, film critic Anupama Chopra compared Fernandez to “a pin-prick on a balloon” in her scathing review of the film. That year, she also did the item number ‘Aapka Kya Hoga Janabe Ali’ (Dhanno) in the film ‘Housefull’.

In 2011, she was cast in ‘Murder 2’ which proved to be a major hit. After the success of this film, she appeared as one of the female leads in ‘Housefull 2’ (2012). She played Bobby, the love interest of John Abraham’s character, Max. While the film was critically panned, it was one of the most successful movies at the box office that year. Fernandez returned in 2016 for ‘Housefull 3’, playing a character named Ganga "Gracy" Patel this time, the love interest of Akshay Kumar's Sandy.

In 2013, she portrayed Omisha, a femme fatale character in the 2013 action thriller ‘Race 2’. Starring alongside Saif Ali Khan, Anil Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, and Abraham, Fernandez learned fencing and some acrobatics to flesh out her character. Despite this, she once more was at the receiving end of negative reviews for her performance. In Prabhu Deva’s directorial venture ‘Ramaiya Vastavaiya’, she made a special guest appearance as herself in the song ‘Jaadu Ki Jhappi’.