Art Malik Biography

Art Malik is a Pakistani-born British actor who achieved international fame in the 1980s through his starring and subsidiary roles in assorted British and Merchant-Ivory television serials and films. He is especially remembered as the doomed Hari Kumar in The Jewel in the Crown at the outset of his career. He also portrayed Islamist terrorist Salim Abu Aziz in True Lies.

He was born Athar ul-Haque Malik in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, the son of Zaibunisa and Mazhar ul-Haque Malik, a physician who would soon qualify as an ophthalmic surgeon in Britain.

When his father secured a job as a surgeon in Moorfields Eye Hospital, Malik was brought to London in 1956, aged three,[2] with his four older brothers. At age 10 he was sent to school in Quetta, Balochistan for one year, and then Bec Grammar School, a selective state school in Upper Tooting, London.