DB7

By Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times

He chose acting, though the Beatles told him he should be a pop star. But when he’s not Gandhi — or a very scary villain — what’s Ben Kingsley really like?

Cliveden. The Eurotrash showbiz press — girls with lower-spine tattoos, bald boys in D&G combats — are being shuttled off to Heathrow in buses. Jaded by meet-the-stars movie junkets, they have just got through another. They don’t look the types to be impressed by Charles Barry’s house and views, perhaps not even by Lady Penelope’s pink fantasy Ford parked in front of the porte-cochere. They have just “done” Thunderbirds, and it’s time to tell the folks back home about it. It’s a whimsically failed attempt to turn Gerry Anderson’s 1960s puppet series into a real movie with real people. Kids might like it, but there’s nothing much for adults. Except that it has Ben Kingsley, a real actor, as the villain, The Hood. And it is he I am here to see.
I am, frankly, not happy about this. I have never known anything about Kingsley, and even though, by the time I get to Cliveden, I’ve read a great deal, I still don’t know what he’s like. I know he did a brilliant impersonation in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, and was simply superb as Don the psychopath in Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast. And I know he’s big both in Hollywood and over here. He has a knighthood and an Oscar, after all. But what’s he actually like? Who is Ben Kingsley? Dunno.

I am ushered into his presence. Blue shirt, jeans, brown loafers, no socks. It could be anybody. But no, wait: thin, fit, brown skin, bald head, big ears, huge nose. Yep, it’s him. Starting with a gentle lob, to get the measure of the man, I ask him about Jonathan Frakes, formerly Commander Riker of Star Trek and now the director of Thunderbirds. This is easy, because nobody, me included, has a bad word to say about Frakes. “Great intensity,” says Kingsley. “Clearly cares about children. He’s a very generous man, a very intelligent man, a strong leader.” Nothing there: this could be a press release speaking. So what about The Hood? “Golly, maybe, well ... certainly, accepting that it’s a fairy story, a modern fairy story dealing with a rescuing angle, it has a good story, Lady Penelope, a trusty knight, Parker, a lost boy, Alan Tracey, one of the most famous superheroes in the world ...”

The sun is shining through ranks of empty Hildon mineral-water bottles on the table. My eyelids feel heavy. “My part ...”

Ah! Right! “... it’s all pantomime. The only way it will work in a fairy story is to have a puff of red smoke or green smoke or orange smoke and always to arrive cackling. I have to be the wicked witch in the story.”

And he took this part because ..? “I’d been doing a lot of press for House of Sand and Fog. I’d said goodbye to that troubled character. But every time I was interviewed about him, a bruise was being poked. There was no way of having a light conversation about that film. I found it distressing, and I was thinking, I’ve really got to do a film soon in which I don’t commit suicide or get shot or beaten to death at the end.” He asked his children — including a stepdaughter, he has five — whether he should do Thunderbirds, and they all said yes. I gratefully seize on this as an oddity.

“Don’t other people ask their children? I’ve no comparison to make. I don’t ask them what to do, I just assess their opinion. I did it recently on another project. I was happy to announce to them that I was doing Fagin for Polanski’s Oliver Twist, in Paris. I get their response because I work away from home so much, I work in exile so much. British actors are a diaspora unto themselves.”

Via his children and his exile, we are drifting towards the theme of identity. With bad or merely good actors, this may not matter. With great actors, it always does. Cary Grant’s career circled round the fact that he was not Cary Grant, he was Archibald Leach. And Ben Kingsley isn’t Ben Kingsley, he’s Krishna Banji, born in 1943 in Scarborough, the son of an Indian doctor with an English wife. Not being themselves means great actors can be anybody. There’s a spoof news item on the web (www.brokennewz.com) that claims Kingsley is, in fact, Hamid Karzai, president of Afghanistan. He’s a blank sheet to the whole world.

He became Ben Kingsley because it sounded more actorish. But he was still Banji when he applied to Rada; he almost missed his audition when a lady with a clipboard called out “Christina Blange”. His handwriting was terrible. It was a very Grantish moment, like something out of North by Northwest. Kingsley just nods, happy I know the story. The family moved to Lancashire and, when he was 16, he went to a party with a friend and they ended up doing a spontaneous routine with funny voices. “I looked up and the whole party was laughing and applauding. We both found it tremendously empowering. It was the first hint of what I wanted to do.”

For a while, he seemed to be heading towards music. He wrote songs for Alan Ayckbourn’s radio show, Northern Drift, then did music for a stage show and was encouraged, by the Beatles, among others, to become a pop star. But he also got parts in The Cherry Orchard and Macbeth, directed by Lindsay Anderson at Chichester. It was, in the event, no contest. His ensuing career divides neatly into two. Up to 1980, he was a stage actor with minimal film and tele- vision parts; after 1980, he was a screen actor. The transformation was a result of being cast as Attenborough’s Gandhi.

“I think I stopped breathing when he told me he had the money for the film and that he wanted to meet me with that role in mind. I was absolutely thrilled. That was the hinge point. I’ve done very little theatre since.”

He won an Oscar for Gandhi and was more or less made as a transatlantic star. Curiously, he has played a Jew in the Holocaust three times: as Simon Wiesenthal in Murderers Among Us; as Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List; and as Otto Frank in Anne Frank: The Whole Story. He has the look, I suppose, of a wiry survivor. More importantly, he is a natural film actor because he is a dazzling close-up performer. He seems to have an instinctive understanding that less is usually more when the camera is rolling. His Itzhak Stern, for example, is a masterpiece of distillation.

“I’m fond of Steven (Spielberg), and I think he trusts me, and I told him that if I do two takes, then I’m going to do less on the third and even less on the fourth.

If I’m doing nine things, I said, ask for seven ... What I act for is the complete thrill of the explosion inside me of getting some strange, eccentric detail so right that everything else suddenly falls into place. In film, the process is heightened because everything is close up and you can concentrate.”

He is growing passionate, no longer just saying the routine things to get through the interview. “What I think I am is a portrait artist — I enjoy the physical act of creating a portrait. I find it exhilarating, the way a painter works. I have some good friends who are painters, and I love being in their studios and seeing their passion and their earnestness and their determination to get it down on canvas. I find it thrilling.”

Oddly, this means he does not necessarily prepare for parts in great detail, though he insists on knowing the whole script: “It’s hard grind, but I don’t feel I’m prepared unless I can walk on the set being able to somehow struggle through the whole script from beginning to end.” He’s sceptical of method techniques, in which actors immerse themselves in the real-world details of a role. “I don’t think I’ve ever participated in an occupation when I knew I was about to play somebody who did that job. I think doing that is like believing that all taxi drivers are the same. But they’re not.”

Once he has the script in his head, he takes most of his inspiration from the set and the actors. Staggeringly, he was two weeks late onto the set of Sexy Beast, so he had to go straight into the part of Don. It is, I tell him, one of the best portrayals of menace in cinema. He stares at me, suddenly startled. “Thank you ... thank you.”

I ask him what he does when he’s not acting, and he sinks into confusion. “Erm, erm ... I don’t know what normal is, but I think I lead a normal life. I enjoy reading. I have a lovely garden. I work with a trainer maybe two or three times a week. I like working on my garden. I have a lovely house in Oxfordshire ... I’m not telling you what I do, am I? I’m talking about the house. Maybe there’s a reluctance, or maybe I can’t tell you what I do. Maybe I don ’t know... ”

Suddenly, he starts thinking about how odd it is to be interviewed. “I don’t know any other craft or profession that regularly does this; sits down and talks about their work to a journalist. It’s strange.” Then he lapses into a bleak but moving monologue about the inauthentic condition of contemporary acting. Actors, he says, have “fallen among thieves”. There is a “great dislocation” between actors, directors and audience. “We’ve been absorbed by fashion and advertising, and given our mythology away. And, when it’s not there, people don’t know what’s missing. But I think it might survive. I think storytelling is tribally essential. I don’t care if we’re socially marginalised, but I do think we have to tell stories.

“It’s a campaign for me. I’m trying to forge a link with a generation of actors who were part of the English repertory tradition, who were overjoyed when they stuck their heads round the curtain at a Thursday matinée and the house was more than half full. That’s got very little to do with being on the cover of Hello!” Kingsley sincerely and passionately cares about his art and preserving its authenticity. But I still don’t know what he’s like. It’s probably the identity thing. Great actors don’t have one. They act, give interviews, then go home and potter in the garden, wondering what normal is. I leave him in his room with the empty bottles of mineral water. He looks a little lost. But he’ll be all right. In a couple of days, Polanski will get hold of him and turn him into Fagin.