Freida Pinto to play British spy Noor Inayat Khan in limited series 'Spy Princess'

‘Slumdog Millionaire’ actress Freida Pinto is set to star in and executive produce ‘Spy Princess’. It is a limited series based on Shrabani Basu’s ‘Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan’, the definitive biography of Noor’s life, from writer Olivia Hetreed and Red Room Films.

The series adaptation based on the book will be done by Olivia Hetreed and Shrabani Basu will serve as a consultant on the series.

For those unversed, Noor Inayat Khan was the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France in 1943.

On the woman behind the story, Freida Pinto said, “She was a fierce and amazing woman, the most unlikely heroine of World War 2. Sending women to the front line is controversial even now. Then it was unthinkable. Sending a Sufi mystic, who won’t use a gun, daughter of a long-haired Indian Guru who preaches love and peace – ridiculous! But Noor thrives, not in spite of her differences, but because of them. Her struggle to reconcile her values with the desire to find her own path and with her complex sense of duty, is something I am so excited to explore and to recreate.”

“Noor is unlike all the other female superheroes, warriors and badass women I see in film and TV, who train so hard and are so great with all the physical stuff, almost leaving us mere mortals to believe that courage means being good at everything. Noor has a quiet strength that she’s not entirely aware of. Alone in Paris, she lives and loves more intensely in a few months than most of us do in a lifetime, helping establish the ‘Secret Armies’ of the Resistance who will rise up on D-Day, astonishing the men who said she should never have been sent to the front line,” Frieda added.

Anand Tucker will direct the series.

Freida Pinto also is producing and set to star in ‘The Henna Artist’, based on Alka Joshi’s bestselling debut novel which is in series development at Miramax TV.