TORONTO - A Montreal actor who was wounded in last week's Mumbai terror attacks described finding himself in the midst of a real-life "Bruce Willis `Die Hard' moment" as he came under a hail of gunfire.

"My arm... just exploded into red," Michael Rudder said as he described the beginnings of the siege in a CBC TV interview that aired Sunday.

"It was like a scarecrow arm inside of a second.... While I was taking that in, I got a bullet in my leg."

Rudder dived to the floor of the Oberoi hotel restaurant just as a third bullet hit him in the buttocks and a fourth one grazed his head.

"I just laid there in utter shock for quite a long time," he said in the interview, which he gave from his hospital bed in Mumbai.

Rudder's acting instincts and experience on movie sets proved a tactical asset: he pretended he was dead until the gunmen moved off.

"My intention, once the bullets started flying, was to pretend -- as I've learned in so many Second World War movies -- that I was dead and just to stay as still as could."

After the gunman left the area, he crawled over to the service exit of the kitchen and fled the building before he was bundled off to hospital in the back of a taxi.

A surgery is scheduled for Tuesday to remove a bullet still in his stomach.

Two of the friends he was dining with were killed in the attacks, which claimed the lives of 174 people, including two Canadians.

One of the Canadians killed was Montreal physician Dr. Michael Moss. The second Canadian killed has been identified as Elizabeth Russell, Moss's wife.

Russell's daughter, Anne Russell, confirmed Sunday that her mother, a retired nurse and social worker, died alongside her partner of 20 years.

When Rudder and his friends first heard gunshots, the actor got up to see what was going on, but hotel staff told him it was just gangsters and he should go back to his table.

"That was my fatal error," he said. "I did go back to my table and I said, `Apparently, it's some kind of gangster activity and it's no big deal.' "

"Five minutes later we were ... just ripped to shreds by bullets."

Rudder never even saw his attackers.

Doctors have told him that he won't be in any condition to travel for a "little while."

The second Canadian wounded, Toronto yoga instructor Helen Connolly, was grazed by a bullet. She has since been released from hospital.

Seventeen other Canadians were inside the Taj and Oberoi hotels when the attacks happened. They were unharmed.

Rudder and three others had travelled to India on a spiritual pilgrimage with their Virginia-based meditation group.

Charles Cannon, the group's spiritual leader, barricaded himself into his hotel room with his two personal assistants from Synchronicity Foundation, stacking furniture against the door.

The three listened to grenade explosions and heavy gunfire outside, "not knowing if in the next moment the door would be blown away and your life would be ended," Cannon said Sunday.

On Saturday afternoon -- nearly 60 hours after the attacks began -- there was a knock at the door: 10 Indian commandos were waiting in the hall.

They escorted Cannon and his colleagues down the stairs, through the flooded and charred hotel.

"The place was like a war zone," Cannon said. "There was blood everywhere."

Cannon said he plans to return to India, though it's too early to say whether he will organize another group retreat.

"We choose life, and we forgive," he said.

-- With files from The Associated Press.