SirSir Ben Kingsley

He was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji, in Yorkshire, in 1943 — and the gap between that name and the one the world knows contains a small, revealing story about race, ambition and belonging in twentieth-century Britain. His father, Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, was a doctor of Gujarati Indian origin whose own family had migrated from India to Zanzibar, off the East African coast, and then to England; his mother was English. The boy grew up in the north of England as the mixed-race son of an immigrant physician, and when he set out to become an actor he made a calculation that many performers of colour made in that era: that his given name would cost him work.

A name assembled from history

And so Krishna Bhanji became Ben Kingsley. The stage name was not invented from nothing; he assembled it from his own family history, drawing on his grandfather's nickname, "King," earned in the clove trade of East Africa. It was, in the plainest terms, an accommodation to English prejudice — a young man of Indian heritage judging, probably correctly, that an English-sounding name would open doors that "Bhanji" would keep shut. Ben Kingsley the name was a compromise with a biased industry; Ben Kingsley the actor would become one of the most decorated performers of his time.

The long apprenticeship

He did not become famous quickly. Kingsley served a long, serious apprenticeship on the stage, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 1960s and spending well over a decade in classical theatre, largely unknown to cinema audiences, building the technical command that would later make his screen transformations possible. He was nearly forty before the role came that would change everything.

Gandhi

In 1982, the director Richard Attenborough cast him in the title role of Gandhi, the vast biographical epic of the Mahatma's life. Kingsley threw himself into a total transformation: he lost a great deal of weight, learned to spin cotton on a charkha as Gandhi had, studied archival newsreel footage until he had captured the exact quality of the walk, the stillness, the voice. The performance won him the Academy Award for Best Actor, and it remains one of the most complete acts of biographical impersonation in the history of film. For the diaspora the image carried a double charge: the Mahatma, the towering figure of Indian nationhood, embodied for a global audience by the son of a Gujarati doctor from Yorkshire — an Indian story told back to the world by a man of the Indian diaspora.

A career that refused a type

What followed was a deliberate refusal of typecasting, a demonstration that the actor was not to be confined to a single register or ethnicity. He played the mild, grieving accountant Itzhak Stern in Spielberg's Schindler's List; the coiled, terrifying gangster Don Logan in Sexy Beast, a performance of pure menace that earned another Oscar nomination; the dispossessed Iranian colonel of House of Sand and Fog; Fagin in Oliver Twist; and, in a lighter key, the comic false "Mandarin" in Iron Man 3. Across the decades he accumulated four Academy Award nominations in all and a reputation for chameleonic range.

Honours, and a Grammy

He was knighted in 2002 for services to the British film industry, becoming Sir Ben Kingsley. He is fond of pointing out a less expected honour as well: he holds a Grammy Award, won for a spoken-word recording of the words of Gandhi — a rare combination of the film industry's highest acting honour and the music industry's, both earned, in a sense, through the same towering role.

Reclaiming the other half

In his later years Kingsley has spoken with evident feeling about reclaiming the Indian half of himself that his stage name once concealed — about the pride he takes in his Gujarati and East African heritage, and about the complicated bargain that a young mixed-race actor had felt compelled to make in the Britain of the 1960s. The name was a mask worn to get in the door; the man behind it has, late in life, insisted on being seen whole.

Why the Roll remembers him

Kingsley belongs on this Roll for two reasons that sit together uneasily and honestly. He reached the absolute pinnacle of Western screen acting — the Oscar, the knighthood, six decades of celebrated work — and he is, through his father, a son of the East African Indian diaspora. And his very name is a small monument to what that generation faced: the pressure to soften, to anglicise, to make oneself acceptable to an industry not yet ready for a leading man called Bhanji. That he then used an English name to give the world its most famous portrait of Gandhi is an irony the Roll records with care. This entry lists him under both names, Krishna Bhanji and Ben Kingsley, because the diaspora's story is contained in the distance between them.

The range of a lifetime

If Gandhi was the summit, the decades around it proved Kingsley could play almost anyone. He was the vicious gangster Meyer Lansky and, most memorably, the coiled monster Don Logan in Sexy Beast, a role of such controlled menace that it earned him an Academy Award nomination and, in the eyes of many, upstaged everything else in the film. He was the dispossessed Iranian colonel in House of Sand and Fog, another Oscar-nominated performance; the gentle, grieving Itzhak Stern in Schindler's List; the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès in Scorsese's Hugo; a sinister presence in Shutter Island; and, lightening the register, comic and villainous turns in Hollywood blockbusters including the Marvel films and a voice role in The Jungle Book. Four Academy Award nominations across his career mark a range few actors of any background have matched.

The honours, and the whole self

Knighted in 2002, holder of a Grammy for recording Gandhi's words, and still working prolifically into his eighties, Kingsley has become an elder statesman of British and international cinema. In his later years he has spoken warmly and often about reclaiming the Indian and East African heritage that his stage name once concealed, taking evident pride in the Gujarati and Zanzibari roots of the Bhanji family. That reconciliation is the heart of why this Roll lists him under both names. Krishna Bhanji changed his name to get past the closed doors of the 1960s British stage; Ben Kingsley then gave the world its defining portrait of Gandhi, won its highest acting honour, and, in old age, insisted on being known for all of who he is. The distance between the two names is the diaspora's own story, and he has lived every inch of it.