Miss World 1994

 Miss World 1994

Miss World 1994 was the 44th Miss World pageant and marked the third consecutive staging of Miss World in Sun City, South Africa. Actor Blair Underwood and supermodel Naomi Campbell served as presenters. The pageant attracted 87 contestants from around the world. At the end of the night, Aishwarya Rai of India, at the time a 21-year-old architecture student, was crowned the new Miss World. Earlier that year, another Indian, Sushmita Sen had won the Miss Universe title, securing the two leading international beauty pageants for India in 1994.

Aishwarya Rai - India
Probably the most successful Miss World title holders, Rai won the Miss World crown in 1994 the same year that her fellow country girl Sushmita Sen won Miss Universe. After relinquished her crown, Rai made her movie debut in Mani Ratnam's Tamil film Iruvar (1997) opposite Mohanlal. She had her first commercial success in the Tamil movie Jeans (1998), and came to the attention of Bollywood in the Hindi movie Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Her performance in the film won her the Filmfare Best Actress Award, and she successfully performed in Bhansali's next project, Devdas (2002), for which she won her second Best Actress Award at the Filmfare. Since then, she has acted in over forty movies in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, and English, including the international productions Bride & Prejudice (2003), Mistress of Spices (2005), and The Last Legion (2007) in English. The first woman from India to ever judge the Cannes International Film Festival, Rai is now the face of Bollywood. She She is now married to Indian actor Abhishek Bachchan. The wedding took place on 20 April 2007.