London: Hindi film actor Anupam Kher on Thursday launched a London chapter of his Actor Prepares, making it Britain's first official Bollywood acting school.

The school is intended to improve the quality of Bollywood's notorious over-the-top hammy acting and represents the next step in the growing connection between Britain and the Hindi film industry.

"I am trying to kill off a certain style of clichéd Bollywood acting. It's already dying so it is the right time to do this international school," said Anupam, who was trained at the National School of Drama in Delhi.

The school is to be based in the West London neighbourhood of Ealing, home to Ealing Studios which made a string of well known English films in the 1950s.

It will work out of the Ealing Institute of Media, and fees have been set at a steep 6,000 pounds for a three-month course. Sixty students will be admitted in the first year.

Although most students are expected to be South Asians, Anupam said there was interest among white Britons as well.

The school is a partnership between Actor Prepares, which Anupam began three years ago, Heathrow City Partnership, a local not-for-profit organisation, and the Ealing Institute of Media, which is a part of Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College.

It will provide the first course of its kind in which actors from Indian cinema and elsewhere come to Britain to pass on their inside knowledge.

Stars such as Boman Irani, Tabu, Urmila Matondkar and filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who are the visiting faculty at Actor Prepares Mumbai, are scheduled to be involved in the teaching programme.

"The standard of acting in Indian films was mediocre generally but in the last few years audiences have become much more educated towards cinema because of the onslaught of satellite channels (showing Western films) and the arrival of multiplexes in India," Anupam told The Times.

Courses will include martial arts, yoga, dance, music and Hindi, diction, improvisation and acting on camera. IANS