British actress Sarita Choudhury has been signed up for a role in M. Night Shyamalan's next big film Lady in the Water, it was announced this week.

The 38 year old actress, who shot to fame with her lead roles in Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra, most recently had a small part in Spike Lee's film She Hate Me.

Despiter her initial success with the 1991 film, she stuck to art-house films and away from Hollywood, playing a Pakistani country-western singer in Wild West (1992), a Chilean maid in Bille August's adaptation of The House of the Spirits (1993), and a lesbian mother in Fresh Kill (1994).

M. Night Shyamalan's latest film tells the story of a superintendent of an apartment building who discovers a sea nymph in the building's pool. LAdy in the Water is currently in production. Shyamalan has written the screenplay for the film and is writing/directing it.

His next project will be bringing the Booker prize winner Life of Pi into a film version. The book is about an indian boy, Pi Patel, who is shipwrecked on a lifeboat with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger - all fighting for survival.

Sarita Choudhury was born in London and spent her early years in Kingston, Jamaica. She has also lived in Mexico for a while. In a previous interview, she put her variety of roles down to lack of opportunities for Indian actors.

"Left to myself I would only play an Indian. But the reality was that there were hardly any Indian characters I could play in the films made in England and Hollywood. So I had to learn how to disappear into a variety of characters," she said.

She is currently working in three other films. Over the Mountains is in post-production and will be the first to see a release. It is about a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City who experiences a crisis of conscience. She plays a lead role.

Indocumentados is currently in production, while work on For Real has not yet started.