Cover Star:Ben Kingsley
In a career spanning more than 30 years, Sir Ben Kingsley has inhabited the skins of saints and devils alike. No other actors can Bend it like Kingsley when playing the role of interloper. Here, he tells Anwar Brett why he prefers the perspective from the outside, looking in. HE MAY HAVE MADE HIS NAME [...]
In a career spanning more than 30 years, Sir Ben Kingsley has inhabited the skins of saints and devils alike. No other actors can Bend it like Kingsley when playing the role of interloper. Here, he tells Anwar Brett why he prefers the perspective from the outside, looking in.
HE MAY HAVE MADE HIS NAME playing the ultimate icon of peace, but in the course of his long career Sir Ben Kingsley has proved equally adept at portraying men of violence. Which makes meeting the man himself an event loaded with uncertainty.
While his performance as Gandhi might loom large in the popular imagination, the foul mouthed psychotic Don Logan in Sexy Beast – who so terrified Ray Winstone’s retired gangster character – proves the wicked counterpoint to the Mahatma’s beatific inner calm.
“Don Logan’s an out-and-out racist,” Kingsley smiles, as we meet in a quiet corner of a Milton Keynes multiplex while he is travelling the country to promote his forthcoming film Fifty Dead Men Walking. “I’ve played both sides of the scale.”
Yet both men are outsiders in a way, characters who live their lives by a particular set of self-imposed principles somewhat removed from the prevailing attitude of those around them. The same might be said of the way he played Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List, a Jewish accountant who becomes a concentration camp prisoner, just as it is true of Jewish Mafioso Meyer Lansky in Bugsy, both equally convincing in their way and recognised, respectively with a Bafta nomination for the former and an Oscar nomination for the latter.
It is now 37 years since Kingsley’s big screen debut as a smiling assassin in the cult thriller Fear is the Key. Then nine years later, in 1982, Richard Attenborough invited him to play Gandhi in the film that made him internationally famous and won him a Best Actor Oscar.
After adding a string of diverse movies and theatre roles to his credit in the years since, it’s tempting to wonder whether Kingsley himself sees a pattern in his work. Sipping his fizzy water, he answers this question with characteristic thoughtfulness.
“I think something is emerging,” he says. “It’s not necessarily about myself and my relationship to the character. I think it’s more my delight in exploring cause and effect. I think nature, or the universe, is constantly struggling towards finding that balance. Not that we ever, as individuals, live in a balanced state. We’re a kind of fulcrum and we’re constantly trying to find balance. I suppose it’s that thread I enjoyed exploring in Schindler’s List and in Sexy Beast. Sometimes I have to find my own cause in order to show the effect to the audience. For instance, Don Logan is an unhealed abused child, therefore tragically he will go on to abuse others. It’s a law of nature.
“And once I’m gripped by that law of nature it seems to me to be pretty immutable. It’s that pattern of human behaviour, and the struggle for symmetry that I’m fascinated by. You throw a man off a train in South Africa because he’s in the wrong compartment,” he adds, referring to the time Gandhi refused to move to a third class
railcoach when he had a first class ticket, “and you bring down a whole empire.”
Themes of cause and effect are present too in his latest film, Fifty Dead Men Walking. Here he plays Fergus, a jaded British policeman operating undercover agents in 1980s Belfast. With the Troubles at their height, the information gleaned from one young man on the inside, Martin McGartland (Jim Sturgess) proves crucial in saving several lives – the 50 men implied by the title – but Fergus maintains a professional detachment that suggests he can leave McGartland to whatever grisly fate awaits him should he feel like it.
For Kingsley the film offered a welcome opportunity to film on the streets of a city largely changed from when he last visited, at around the time his new film is set.
“I was there for the Belfast Film Festival, which was an extremely brave thing to hold in the late 1980s. I attended it, and was taken through steel cages, checkpoints – it was very tough. The film festival was not very highly attended, but there were some great stalwarts there.
“Then I came back years later to do this movie and I saw the differences. Both sides of the sectarian divide worked with us to help the movie get made because both sides were utterly convinced by [director] Kari Skogland’s impartiality, by her determination to present a balanced film about a young man caught up in a terrible circumstance.”
Although he turned 65 at the tail end of last year, Kingsley is showing no signs of slowing down, cutting back or opting for the easier option in his career. If anything, he is winning fans among a new generation of 20-somethings who never saw Gandhi and know him more for films like last year’s The Wackness, a movie that became a cult for its hip-hop soundtrack, and in which Kingsley played a radical psychotherapist getting down with the kids.
The seeds of this driven work ethic lie in the origins of his own acting career. Having auditioned for, but been turned down by, the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) the determination to prove himself provided his earliest, strongest motivation.
“I think that rejection is quite good for you, it was certainly good for me. Shortly after I steeled myself into doing a similar audition for a repertory company and they gave me a job. Then I developed another audition for another company, and they gave me a job too. I went to Stoke-on- Trent, to the theatre in the round under Peter Cheeseman and there was no hiding place there at all. You couldn’t create a lazy technique, so that was my drama school.
“And from there, thank God, I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company and I was blessed with directors like John Barton, Trevor Nunn, Peter Hall, Peter Brooke, Terry Hands, David Jones. We were being paid to work in the greatest drama academy in the world. So in the end that pang of hurt for not being allowed into RADA actually propelled me into the RSC.”
Certain things are self evident from any conversation with Kingsley. He has a deepseated respect for the craft of the actor, and he mentions his three sons with some pride, two of whom have followed him into the acting profession (he also has a daughter). But we steer clear of discussing relationships. The much-married Kingsley became the subject of lurid headlines when his third wife was photographed kissing someone else in a nightclub. He has since remarried.
More consistent has been his love of Shakespeare which, since leaving the stage behind, has yet to be indulged on screen.
“There’s a book called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, which is extraordinary,” he enthuses. “You’re immersed in this world and are examining very beautifully defined patterns of behaviour. I found it absolutely thrilling. To be pitted against and working with such an intelligent imagination, wonderful directors and great fellow actors. I’ve been addicted to examining the geometry of human behaviour, the bizarre symmetry of those patterns, ever since.”
He will soon have the chance to express his passion for the Bard, after acquiring the rights to a book about Shakespeare with a view to producing it and starring in the lead. Before then cinema audiences will see him in Martin Scorsese’s Ashecliffe and in the video game adaptation Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
Which is far from shabby for a man showing commendable industry at an age when others are forced into retirement. Or for an actor who found his way in the business on his own terms – he was born in Yorkshire to an English mother and Indian father and was originally called Krishna Bhanji.
“I don’t think that it was ever shown to me that it was a disadvantage,” he smiles. “Only on one occasion and it wasn’t to do with my audition or even my physicality. It was to do with my name. This director in the north of England said, ‘It’s a really lovely audition, Krishna, but we don’t know how to cast you.’
“So my Dad, bless him, said, ‘You know you can just change your name.’ He was descended from Gujarat, where the people were very pragmatic businessmen. He told me to change my name, that it was no big deal, and so I got ‘Ben’ from my Dad’s nickname, and ‘Kingsley’ from his dad’s nickname ‘King Clove’ because he was a spice trader. I did the same audition the following week, and they said, ‘When can you start?’ Since then I’ve never actually been typecast in any way because I’ve got too much of an appetite to explore.”
It may partly explain his reaction to being given a knighthood in the 2001 honours list. The last time I met Kingsley, he said of his letter informing him of his knighthood: “I read it and I was shaking. I put it in a drawer in my office and I got up at four o’clock one morning to read the letter again and make sure I wasn’t dreaming.”
For a while he insisted that he be addressed as Sir Ben – something that was an anomaly in an industry where the ennobled tend to play down titles – but his evident pride in this honour is a further sign of the outsider being entirely embraced by the established.
One assumes the consequence of having a background such as his would make Ben Kingsley open to new experiences and different points of view. The man himself does not seem so sure.
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “All I know is what I know from my own experience growing up. The only way I can inhabit others is through my acting. I’ve played bigots and victims of racism, people who’ve campaigned against racism for the fundamental slur on humanity that it is. I’ve been blessed to see all perspectives and can understand all perspectives.”
No wonder the smile returns to Kingsley’s face and – knowing as he does that there’s continued demand for his services as an actor – it doesn’t falter.
Fifty Dead Men Walking is released in the UK on 10 April
