Rang De Basanti has been a special film from day one. It was not only the boys who weaved the magic on silverscreen, the firangi Sue too won many hearts with her impeccable Hindi and wonderful histrionics. In case you're wondering who is this wonderkid... read on.

Alice is the youngest daughter of Lord Chris Patten of Barnes, the 28th and last British Governor General of Hong Kong. And her tears on that historical night of June 1997, when Hong Kong was handed over to China, still remain the abiding image of Britain's retreat from its last post.

Rang de Basanti is her first film after several television and theatre roles. Its opening weekend set a box-office record and it is still in the Indian Top Ten.

Tells Alice: "It's a very different kind of Indian film — not your typical Bollywood fare. There are no big song-and-dance sequences, which is a shame, in a way, because I would have liked to have had that experience. But there is one party scene where there's music. I try and join in with the dancing and look fairly foolish."

Last year Antonia Bernath, 23, was cast fresh from drama school in Subhash Ghai's Kisna: The Warrior Poet. Toby Stephens, the son of Dame Maggie Smith, played a British army officer in The Rising, which centred on the events leading up to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and Sophie Dahl and Saffron Burrows have both made Indian films.

But it is Alice Patten who has arguably made the biggest breakthrough, as her father, now the Chancellor of Oxford University, has discovered. "Films like these are making people across (the world) sit up and take notice," he told the Times of India yesterday.

Ms Patten said: "My father's out in India at the moment on Oxford business. He's being hailed as Alice Patten's dad, and about time, too!"