Navi Rawat
Navi Rawat, also known as Navalata Rawat was born in Malibu, California in 5th June, 1977. She spent the early days of her life there until moving to New York to attend New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She graduated as double major with degree in English and American literature and Drama. She is the daughter of an Indian father and German mother.
In her carrier as an actress, in quite a few occasions Navi Rawat played the roles of Indians, Latinas and Iranians. The 5’6” or 1.68m tall US born actress had her first significant breakthrough in 2003 when she was awarded with the recurring role of Theresa Diaz- a Hispanic girl on the super hit series “The O.C.”. Later in the same year, she starred in the critically acclaimed and Academy Award nominated film “House of Sand and Fog” as Soraya. In this film she costarred with Sir Ben Kingsley, the renowned half-Indian actor who portrayed Mahatma Gandhi in the Oscar-winning role. It is assumed that he was a great inspiration behind the success of Navi Rawat. However, Rawat made her biggest mark on CBS new crime drama “Numb3rs” where she played the role of Amita Ramanujan who was a brilliant Indian mathematics and astrophysics professor. Ramanujan helped Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) to pursue criminals for the FBI and carried a torch for him. Here she demonstrated a mixture of both vulnerability and cool intelligence.
Navlata Rawat played a guest role as Melanie in the first season of Fox television series 24. Some of the other films that brought success for the 32 year old actress includes “Popular” (1999), The princess and the Marine (1999), Roswell (1999), “Fastlane” (2002), “The Street Lawyer” (2003), the sci-fi “Thoughtcrimes” (2003), “the Project Greenlight”, Feast (2005), and the romantic comedy “Loveless in Los Angeles” (2006) and “Undead or Alive” (2007). Navi Rawat created quite an impression by playing a number of smaller roles. One of them was in “Angel” where she played the role of a psychotic vampire Slayer- Dana.
Though Navi Rawat was a bit worried about her ethnicity which she feared would limit her acting opportunities, yet the actress managed to make her way out in the middle and gained a lot of attention in the media within a small period of time. The exotic look of Rawat makes her something of a chameleon, which helped her to play characters from widely differing backgrounds.
