Ben Kingsley
Ben Kingsley
Sir Ben Kingsley is an English actor. In a career spanning over 40 years, he has won an Oscar, Grammy, BAFTA, two Golden Globes and a Screen Actors Guild Award. He is known for his starring role as Mohandas Gandhi in the 1982 film Gandhi, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is also known for his performances in the films Schindler's List, Twelfth Night, Sexy Beast, Lucky Number Slevin, Shutter Island, Prince of Persia: The...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth31 December 1943
CitySnainton, England
I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.
The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.
I always try to find something I admire about every character I play.
Unfortunately I went to a hotel in Krakow, and unfortunately, one night, there was a brawl in the bar because a horrible anti-Semitic remark was made to one of my fellow Israeli actors, one of my fellow actors who was an Israeli, sorry, and we were all extremely upset. I reacted rather violently, I'm afraid.
Well, it's wonderful to be identified strongly with my work.
I hope I'm able to achieve more on camera through stillness, through focus, through being quite careful to do less on every take, rather than more. So I'm reducing, rather than adding. Which hopefully is a good exercise. That's what I'd like to do.
Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.
I think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don't understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things.
It is better for me to serve a charity as an actor or a voice, rather than at a luncheon being just a celebrity.
Equal partners aren't always what we envision as being manifestly equal. Equality can come in many different shapes and sizes and combinations.
The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.
I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.
That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour.