A small studio in Ealing is filled with actors putting on pained expressions of passion, running in slow motion and making breathless declarations of love. The first Bollywood acting school in Britain is officially open for business.

The West London suburb has been chosen by Anupam Kher, one of India's most prized character actors, as an ideal place to train British actors to crack the Indian film industry.

Yesterday he instructed his students in the finer points of cliché, once considered an essential ingredient for the thousands of commercial films churned out by Bombay-based studios each year.

Kher's purpose is not to replicate the kitsch of past films but to demonstrate the traps that his students will be trained to avoid. “Indian cinema has changed because the audience has changed,” he said. “They are not easily impressed anymore. They want to see films about how people behave in real life. What I'm trying to do is to get rid of cliché, which for years we've seen in Bollywood movies.”

At the end of the course, each of the seven trainees will travel 4,500 miles from the Ealing Institute of Media to Kher's school in Bombay, where they will be introduced to contacts who can give them a headstart on the estimated 10,000 people who arrive in the city every day with dreams of stardom.

Among the students who have paid £4,000 for the three-month course is Prinesh Mistry, a 27-year-old futures trader from Staines, Surrey, who was inspired to sign up after reading about it in The Times.

He hopes that with Kher's tuition and studio knowledge he may find a second career as a Bollywood actor. “I've got no acting experience [but] I thought, 'I have a raw talent. I'm always trying to entertain people, making jokes. Let's give it a go'.”

His dream job has always been to be a trader but he found out that “in trading there's very little emotion involved. It's about making things as boring as possible.”

Kher, who is best known in Britain for his roles in Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, opened his Actor Prepares school in Bombay three years ago but has been teaching for decades. His first attempt to teach acting was hampered by his discovery that the course organiser owned no buildings. “We used to conduct classes on beaches and on railway platforms,” he said. “I was more ambitious than my students were, and sometimes I used to meet them at auditions.”

Students at the Ealing course will be taught yoga, martial arts, Bollywood-style dance routines and, if necessary, Hindi.

Anu Singh, 20, moved to London from California to attend the course. “I'm not closing my options but now I'm focused on the Hindi film industry. In Hollywood it's harder for us to find roles that are substantial.”

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