And so, in 1992, at the startlingly young age of 15, she moved from Miami to Mumbai with one goal: to marry Bollywood megastar Salman Khan. "At 15, you have a license to be stupid," recalls Ms. Ali. "I had a crush, and I thought in order to meet him, I'd have to join films. So I did."
She makes it look just that simple. Despite having moved to Florida from Pakistan at a young age, Ms. Ali somehow persuaded her father to send her to India under the pretext of wanting to experience the culture. She had celebrated photographer Gautam Rajadhyaksha shoot her portfolio, and was approached by Dharmendra's agent in a hotel lobby, asking to screen-test her for a project designed to launch his son Bobby Deol. To call what happened next serendipity would be an understatement " Ms. Ali says Salman Khan himself randomly chanced upon her photographs at a modeling agency, and he called her, offering her a role in his next film.
"I was a silly teenager, it was very surreal to go after something thousands of miles away and have it actually happen," she says.
Ms. Ali acted in nine films during the 1990s, most of them big-scale but forgettable duds like "Andolan," "Yaar Gaddar," and "Aao Pyar Karen," and opposite A-listers such as Sanjay Dutt, Om Puri, and Saif Ali Khan. But her focus was always Salman Khan. "I had zero interest in being an actress; you can see that by seeing my films," she says. "I was madly in love with him."

Courtesy of Somy AliSomy Ali with Salman Khan during a shooting for the film "Bulund" which was not released.
Mr. Khan broke up with then-girlfriend Sangeeta Bijlani to date Ms. Ali, and the two were together for eight years ... until Mr. Khan then allegedly moved on to Aishwarya Rai. "It was probably karma for me " I was so engrossed and selfish about my dream that I'd ignored the fact that he was with someone else. It was so wrong, ethically and morally, but I realized this at 35, not at 16," Ms. Ali says. "And if I had not broken up with him and come to America, I would have married him and been unhappy."
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