Dia Mirza Handrich nicknamed Dee and more popularly known as Dia Mirza, (born on December 9, 1981) is a Indian model and actress who appears in Bollywood films. She was a second runner up at Femina Miss India, 2000 and was subsequently sent to Miss Asia Pacific, 2000, where she won.
She completed the hat-trick of India winning international pageants in the year 2000 (Lara Dutta won the Miss Universe title and Priyanka Chopra won the Miss World title in the same year) when she won the Miss Asia Pacific title on 3 December 2000 in Manila, Philippines, also making her the first Indian contestant to win this title in 29 years.The actress along with her boyfriend Sahil Sangha and good friend Zayed Khan has started her own production house, Born Free Entertainment, and is making the first film Love Breakups Zindagi under the banner.
Dia Mirza was born in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. Her father, Frank Handrich, was a German graphic and industrial fair designer, architect, artist and interior designer from Munich and her mother, Deepa is a Bengali Indian who is an interior designer, landscaper and currently does social work as a volunteer to help alcoholics and addicts. They separated when she was six years old. Her father died when she was nine and her mother remarried Ahmed Mirza, who died in 2004. She adopted her stepfather's surname Mirza and has recently adopted the last name of her birth-father and became Dia Mirza Handrich
