Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai tests positive for coronavirus

AFP, 12TH JULY, 2020-Bollywood superstar Aishwarya Rai has tested positive for the coronavirus, a Mumbai city authority official told AFP Sunday, just a day after her actor father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan said he was in hospital with the infectious disease.

Her eight-year-old daughter, Aaradhya, was also COVID-19 positive, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

Bachchan’s actor son Abhishek, Rai’s husband, said he too was positive but that both their cases were mild.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan took the Miss World crown in 1994 and made her acting debut in the late 1990s.

She went on to become one of the most famous Bollywood faces abroad as well as in India and has been a regular on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. She married Abhishek Bachchan in 2007.

The elder Bachchan, 77 -- idolised in India and affectionately known as “Big B” -- has a more than four-decade-long career in the film industry. He was voted “actor of the millennium” in a BBC online poll in 1999 and became the first Indian actor to gain a lookalike at London’s Madame Tussauds waxworks museum.

India on Sunday reported its highest single-day virus tally of more than 28,600 cases, for a nationwide total of just under 850,000 infections.