A passage to Hollywood

What it lacked in A-list celebrities it more than made up for in determined party power, which is why Monday morning finds Janet de Vigne, the Edinburgh actress who plays the German tourist taken for a ride by Slumdog Millionaire's streetwise young orphans, nursing a suitably epic hangover.

De Vigne's cousin hosted the party for her at her home in the Grange, complete with red carpet borrowed from the local Dominion cinema, while they watched the actual ceremony on satellite TV. It's not every actress, after all, whose first major film reaps eight Academy Awards.

At 45, de Vigne, a classically trained soprano, is more used to theatre and opera than the big screen. However, it was her skill as a linguist that prompted her recruitment for the trip of a lifetime and a part in what has proved to be a cinematic phenomenon.

It all started with a seemingly innocuous e-mail from an acting agency one evening in December 2007, looking for a German-speaking actress at short notice. "I don't look particularly thin and waif-like," smiles de Vigne, sitting in Edinburgh restaurant L'Escargot Bleu, complete with a plastic Oscar statuette someone has given her, and doubtless trying not to think of snails. "So they probably thought I looked the perfect German. There was a telephone number and it was one of those nights when you just thought, 'God, shall I or shan't I?'"

Like the trouper she is, de Vigne smiles gamely for our photographer, simultaneously dispatching a friend to the nearest chemist for a hangover remedy. In the event, of course, she did phone that number and was asked if she could audition the next morning. "I said I was in Edinburgh and they were in London, and they said, 'Don't worry, we'll send you the script by e-mail and if you have a friend with a Mac, you can film your clip and send it to us online.'

"So my friend Nial Smith (creator of the Three Grazers in front of the National Gallery of Scotland during the Edinburgh Cow Parade two years ago] did it for me and we sent it down."

At the time she was poised for a part in the Royal Lyceum's panto: instead, she found herself on the 6am flight to London next morning, to the Indian embassy, where a production assistant met her. "I jumped out of the cab, gave her my passport, she gave me ten quid for a cup of tea and bun and did the business with the guys at the embassy, while I wrote my Christmas cards."

Then it was vaccinations and a taxi to Heathrow, and it was only on the plane to Delhi that she got a chance to read the script. "Danny Boyle did warn us to be careful, because when you first see the Taj Mahal, it just has this incredible effect on you, and he was right. We were able to watch the sun rise on it every morning for a week, and it was like an otherworldly experience."

Her screen husband was played by a seasoned English actor, William Relton, "and the Taj had such an effect that I said to him one day, 'This is a perfect time for a Shakespearean sonnet,' so he started with 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day…' and I just burst into tears. And this gorgeous Indian girl in a gold sari asked me what was the matter and I said, 'This place is so beautiful, I just can't take it.' She just gave me a big hug."

De Vigne and Relton played a gullible pair of tourists conducted round the Taj by the young "Slumdogs", Jamal (the eventual eponymous millionaire) and his brother Salim, played at that stage in the film by Tanay Chhedna and Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala.

"Tanay was a hoot," recalls the actress. "He was dressed up as a young slum kid, all this dirt, and of course it was fake dirt. But he was going up to all the tourists, asking them for money and getting some extremely choice responses. The weird thing was, there were all these kids watching us who were slum kids."

It was her first visit to India, and she was so appalled by the poverty there that she's since become involved in fund-raising for the Edinburgh-based charity Scottish Love In Action, which supports Dalit or "untouchable" caste children in India. Last month, a charity screening of Slumdog Millionaire at the Dominion raised around 1,000: "That will put about one kid through college, so if anyone else wants to donate…"

Along with the well and truly Taj-ed tourist, de Vigne's Scottish credentials (she was born in Essex but has lived in Edinburgh on and off since 1991) found her providing the voice of a Scottish caller to the call centre in which Jamal eventually works. "Kingussie via Motherwell," she laughs of her accent. She may have been off-screen, but the part enabled her to meet the film's young male lead, Dev Patel. "I just thought he was perfect for the part. As soon as I saw him, I thought every woman in the audience would look at him and think, 'My son.' He just has this lovely, gangly awkwardness."

She is less enthusiastic about seeing herself on the big screen, in a performance that included some uncomplimentary close-ups of "my big bum wobbling towards the Taj Mahal. I don't think it's ever nice seeing yourself on screen for the first time, but I take comfort from the fact that Katharine Hepburn apparently hated watching herself on screen. If she hated it, I can hate it as well."

The film's director, Danny Boyle, she reckons, had an excellent working relationship with his cast. "They all respected him and he's a very down-to-earth, nice bloke basically, and I'm absolutely delighted that the film won all these Oscars.

"It's an excellent film for these times. If ever you needed to know that love can triumph over money, it's now, isn't it?"

For details of Scottish Love In Action, see www.sla-india.org