ONE OF THE major stars of multi-Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire has lost all the awards she won for her role in the movie, after her family home was destroyed in a major fire in Mumbai on Friday.

Rubina Ali – who played the younger version of Latika, the female lead in Danny Boyle’s eight-Oscar-winning production – still lived in the slums of Mumbai, and says that any major awards she had been given were lost in the fire, which gutted her house.

“I lost the six trophies I had won in the fire. Thankfully, my passport was spared,” she told the Times of India.

Though Ali and her co-star Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail – who played the youngest version of Salim Malik – were promised homes and an education by Boyle’s Jai Ho Trust, twelve-year-old Ali had still been living at home and was to move next month.

“My awards are gone, my memories are gone,” she told CNN, explaining that she had been watching TV when she had heard her neighbours yell, “fire, fire!”.

Ali’s father told The Hindu newspaper that the family had time merely to grab some clothes and the television – a flat-screed LCD – before fleeing to the nearby Bandra railway station.

It adds that the local government has pledged compensation for each person affected by the fire to the tune of 1,000 rupees – the equivalent of €15.84 at today’s exchange rate – with a cap of 5,000 rupees (€79.22) per family.

Reports in 2009 suggested that Rubina was paid only around £500 (€580) for her work on the film – which took about a year – though the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, said the wage paid was over three times the average annual salary for an adult living in the area.

The 2008 film was produced on a budget of $15m (€10.75m) and grossed over €270m worldwide during its cinema release.