Veteran actress Shabana Azmi moves overseas to flaunt her stellar acting performance as she is a part of six-episode British TV series 'Next of Kin' that started on Monday. 

The plot of this TV series revolves around a family fell apart when a bomb goes off in London on the day that the protagonist, general practitioner Mona's doctor-brother is abducted and murdered in Pakistan. It is the Emmy Award-winning actress Archie Panjabi who plays the lead role Mona and Shabana plays her widowed mother.

Talking about her role in this grand project Shabana says, "What I liked about my character is that she's a somewhat traditional Asian mother who dotes on her son, but in a crisis she becomes more open, understanding and a strength for her family, far removed from the world of fundamentalism.''

The 67-year-old actress talked about filming a scene from the series that is close to her heart when she sees the body of her on-screen son. She says, "There was a stupefied silence on the sets and by the end of it, both Justin and I were crying." Interestingly, Navin Chowdhry who plays her son in this series had also played her son in Madame Sousatzka, the 1988 British film also featuring Shirley MacLean as a pianist. "This was the first time I was seeing him since then and he looked exactly the same. He's a pretty boy," she adds. Shabana is extremely serious and active when its all about issues like radicalisation, alienation, multi-racialism and extremism that the series raises.

The ITV drama has 9 pm primetime slot and is written and created by husband and wife team Paul Rutman and Natasha Narayan.