Just a couple of years ago, Frieda Pinto was modelling and presenting a low-key travel show in India called Full Circle.

Today her CV includes a Woody Allen film as well as the prequel to Planet Of The Apes – and she’s about to play Antonio Banderas’s daughter.

Not a bad rate of progress for a 26-year-old actress.

Pinto, of course, owes her success to the low-budget British film Slumdog Millionaire. Before Danny Boyle cast her as Mumbai orphan Latika, she’d never appeared on the silver screen before.

But following the film’s release in January last year, and eight subsequent Oscars, its young stars Pinto and her on and off-screen boyfriend Dev Patel were propelled into the limelight.

“It changed my life completely, but it didn’t make me unrecognisable because that would have been sad, if it had somehow corrupted me,” she says.

“What it did was give me this brilliant opportunity to go out there and say, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. ‘Yes’ to the right things and ‘No’ to the things are not going to benefit me in any way.”

While she was busy promoting Slumdog in Los Angeles, Pinto’s agent got in touch about a film called Miral.

Slumdog director Boyle helped her make an audition tape and within two days of sending it to the film’s director, Oscar nominee Julian Schnabel, she’d got the part.

Miral is based on Rula Jebreal’s semi-autobiographical novel about the lives of three generations of women in war-torn Jerusalem.

Pinto plays Miral, a Palestinian girl who is left by her father at Dar Al-Tifl Al-Arabi Institute, an orphanage founded by Hind Husseini for survivors of the Deir Yassin massacre (when Zionist paramilitary groups attacked a Palestinian-Arab village).

It’s a gritty role. Miral falls for a Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) activist and comes face to face with the reality of the 1990s Intifada as she teaches at a Palestinian refugee camp.

The actress knew little of the Arab-Israeli conflict other than news stories she’d seen on TV, and knew the film might be controversial.

“One of my friends is a lawyer and she knew a lot about the conflict, so I took note of what she said, but until you go there, nobody understands the human side.

"That’s when I realised, ‘I’m going to leave the politics of this alone and am going to work on the human story’. So whatever I had learnt or knew, I had to unlearn to play this part.”

Filming in Israel lasted three-and-a-half months. Pinto stayed with a Palestinian family and spent time at the Dar Al-Tifl orphanage and at a refugee camp to prepare for the role.

It helped that Jebreal, the author, who based the character of Miral on her own experience, was on hand throughout the shoot.

“It’s actually very useful having this person around you, telling you stories that are not from the book or the script and giving you more of an insight into her life.

"But at the same time, I couldn’t pretend to be Rula. I had to imbibe the essence of that person into the character I was playing.”

One of the hardest scenes for Pinto was when Miral is taken in for questioning by police for her involvement in a demonstration, and beaten.

“I talked to Rula about the torture scene and I said, ‘Did this really happen the way it’s written?’ She replied, ‘It happened... but a lot worse’.

Like the role of Latika in Slumdog, Miral appealed to Pinto because it gave her the chance to talk about something new. “I just feel there are so many stories that need to be told and very few films that are doing that.

“So when I get this opportunity to do it, I think I should embrace it rather than take on something that’s mindless and that I won’t be satisfied doing. I’m not saying commercial films are mindless, but I mean mindless in the sense that they’re not going to do anything for me.”

It’s this attitude that explains why Pinto has shied away from more mainstream films and plumped for the likes of a musicologist in You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (Woody Allen’s latest comedy), Rise Of The Apes and Black Gold, which sees her flying out to Tunisia to play Antonio Banderas’s Arab princess daughter next month.

With all the jetting around, how does she find time for her British boyfriend and former Skins actor Dev Patel?

“Dev’s so understanding and that’s what really matters. I need to do the same, you know, that’s how we make it work.”