In the company of Ben

I’m nervous about interviewing Ben Kingsley. Research has lead me to believe that I’m about to meet someone who is, to be somewhat diplomatic, easily mistaken for a pompous old windbag; someone who bangs on about their ‘craft’; someone who, the tabloids say, insists on being called ‘Sir Ben’ even in the bedroom.

It’s nice to be wrong on all fronts. Certainly, the 63-year-old is impressively Shakespearean in his use of language. But he’s a charmer, an old-fashioned theatrical ‘luvvie’ in the very best sense of the word. These inclinations are, however, tempered by his inner-geezer. There’s always a no-nonsense Yorkshire-born lad lurking just beneath the poetry.
“What a load of old crap”, he’ll say when the occasion seems to demand it.
I wonder if some of the previous encounters I’ve read about haven’t been filtered through a rather distempered lens. There may be hardened journalists out there who won’t sit up and beg when an interviewee says things like, “Oh Tara, you’re a breath of fresh air”. Or “Oh, you phrased that so beautifully”.
Not me. I’m a sucker for good manners and flattery. By the end of our chat, I’m quite ready to roll over and play dead at Ben’s behest. Like, woof. This is what we call in the trade ‘an old pro’.
“I’m just an old song and dance man”, he tells me. “Growing up I was known as the Danny Kaye of the family. I was a storyteller and a singer. I still think of myself that way. At home I was always entertaining my family. At school I was always being sent out of the class for making the other children laugh too much. I loved making people laugh. The theatre companies I’ve worked with over the years have given me a discipline about it but underneath I’m just a messer.”
That said, he does take his work fairly seriously. It’s not that he bangs on about his ‘art’. It’s just that he speaks of each and every character he’s played as if recalling an old friend. Equally, he dismisses the ‘method’ as ‘a load of rubbish’ but he is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that a scene feels real. For his Oscar-winning turn in Gandhi, he learned how to spin cotton so he wouldn’t look clumsy with a loom. And more impressively, for Colonel Behrani’s suicide scene in 2003’s House Of Sand And Fog, he actually taped a plastic bag over his head.
“Oh yes, that was very frightening”, he recalls. “I did have a medic standing by and an oxygen cylinder. But in order to inhale the plastic against your mouth you have to run out of oxygen. Having run out you have about 60 to 90 seconds left before you’re dead. It’s a very quick way of killing yourself. You know how deep sea divers have a series of hand signals for their colleagues? I replicated those for the crew who did not take their eyes of my hands. As soon as I gave the signal, they rushed in and cut me free and I was able to breathe again. It was a tight call but in order to tell that story properly you couldn’t fake it.”
There’s nothing quite so traumatic in The Last Legion, a pre-Arthurian romp set against the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The film, directed by Doug Lefler of Xena: Warrior Princess fame, tells the story of Rome’s last child Emperor, Romulus Augustus (played by Thomas Sangster) who journeys to Britain under the protection of a motley band of warriors (notably Ben and Colin Firth) to evade the onslaught of the Goths.
I wonder if such a role gives him a chance to relax more than, say, his performance as the father of Anne Frank in 2000?
“Well, that’s an interesting comparison because they’re both father figures”, he notes. “They are both out to protect the destiny of a child. One catastrophically lost his child through forces that simply overwhelmed him. And in The House Of Sand And Fog I played Colonel Behrani whose son dies in his arms. So with The Last Legion it was marvellous to play a protector whose child doesn’t die. I think every child goes through a phase that might be banner headlined – “is there anybody there?” That’s why I loved this. His parents do not listen to him respectfully. He’s completely used by them as a pawn in their political game. I took great joy in protecting the disempowered child. As a piece of mythology about the journey of the child it’s almost flawless. I have an absolute abhorrence, a natural abhorrence I’m sure, of child abuse or child neglect. So, in that sense, it wasn’t really relaxed. It’s never very relaxed with me. He’s a passionate character. It’s a light-hearted romp, I agree, but it has to have a heart. Otherwise it won’t work. Your job as an actor is to give it that heart.”
Ben Kingsley, or Krishna Bhanji as he was originally known, was born in Scarborough and raised in Salford. His heritage, however, is rather more romantic. His paternal grandfather, a spice trader nicknamed King Clove, who moved from India to Zanzibar, inspired his adopted surname. His father, an Ismalli Muslim and a doctor, was born in Kenya but moved to England aged 14. There, he met Ann Lyna Mary, Ben’s mother, an actress and model of Russian Jewish descent.
Given this wonderfully exotic endowment I wonder if he didn’t stick out like a sore thumb in Salford during the fifties?
“I like your phrase better,” he laughs. “I think I stuck out like an exotic thumb. It was always lovely being me in Salford. It was Salford that gave me my first taste of celebrating that genetic mix – all the confluence of great people that I must have in my blood. The first time I walked on stage it was for Salford Amateur Dramatic Society. It was those folk who pushed me and said “you’ve got to audition, you’ve got to give professional acting a shot”. So, bless it, the exhibitionism found an outlet thanks to Salford.”
His colourful genealogy brought young Ben to the attention of Brian Epstein who wished to package him as a rock star. Instead, the budding actor put his genetic inheritance in the service of film and theatre. To date he has played tragic Jewish figures caught up in the Holocaust (Schindler’s List, Anne Frank), a Latin American torturer (Death And The Maiden), a penniless Iranian immigrant in America (House Of Sand And Fog) and a lawyer to the mob (Bugsy).
“I know,” he says. “I meet people who think I’m Jewish or Indian or Iranian or Polish. Well, thank God for that. All these bits of the world are claiming me. It’s so lovely. I have a home everywhere I go.”
His chameleon-like career may have been enabled by his heritage but there can be few actors, living or dead, who have the chops to play Gandhi, then turn around and essay Don Logan, the unstable British gangster with a fondness for the ‘c’ word found in Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast.
“Don Logan actually scared me,” Ben admits. “But quite simply we all have a good angel and a bad angel inside of us. And dramatically that struggle is often externalised. I was both accused and lauded after Gandhi and Sexy Beast. But I believe we all have a Mother Teresa and a Myra Hindley we can tap into. My key to Don Logan in Sexy Beast was not how evil or frightening he was. I read the part and thought ‘well, here’s an abused child if ever I saw one, who had grown into adulthood completely unhealed’. That allowed me to have some affection for him.”
Even Don Logan, it must be said, wears an air of authority. Glancing back at the extraordinary CV of Ben Kingsley, this seems to be a common strand.
“Oh yes”, he agrees. “I’ve been very attracted to the complexities and demands of what we call authority figures. I became mesmerised by them through Shakespeare. Nobody writes about them more beautifully. He coined the phrase ‘uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’. He examined the psychology of responsibility. I’ve been lucky enough to play Hamlet and a lovely mix of those characters. My work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, for ten years on and off, gave me a respect for hierarchy and courtliness and taught me so much about love and revenge, cause and effect, behavioural patterns. It’s not pompous or serious. His exploration of these things is genuinely joyful. It’s not Ben. It’s my appetite for these wonderful characters and Shakespeare’s perfect delineation. So I’m always looking for echoes of Lear and Hamlet and Falstaff.”
It’s almost time to go and I keep noticing that he refers to himself as ‘Ben’. Why do we keep hearing Lord Putnam and various tabloids alleging that Sir Ben Kingsley has an over-fondness for his peerage and, by extension, for himself?
“I know what got Lord Putnam’s knickers in a twist”, he says in pure Salford-speak. “There was a misprint on a film poster. It was a classic Chinese whispers situation. They were told specifically for the poster for Lucky Number Slevin to never, ever put ‘Sir’ on a poster. Of course this gets mangled as the message was passed along and it became ‘you must call him ‘Sir Ben’ on the poster’. I couldn’t believe when I found out.”
And suddenly, the Yorkshire-born lad is back.
“He has to be called ‘Sir’. What a load of old crap”.

The Last Legion is released on October 19