Dear Sir

Sir Ben Kingsley offers me his hand - his left hand. Not to shake, but to hold. Graciously he bows his head and whispers "Hello". It's like meeting the Pope (if the Pope ever dressed head-to-toe in black Armani). I assume that he is busy Living the Part and Building the Character for some Pope-like role in a future production. He isn't. He offered me his left hand because he dropped a dumb-bell on his right. And the Pope-like manner? It's just Sir Ben.

He has rushed here from a photographer's studio in Soho. He hates being photographed, unless it's in character. "I am so profoundly an actor, that if I get caught between what is acting and what is not acting, like being photographed, I just have to go neutral." And he remains resolutely neutral until his son, Edmund, rings on the mobile. The couple excitedly arrange to meet at Groucho's, and Kingsley blows his son a kiss goodbye. Then he returns to neutral.

Kingsley has four children from his first two marriages. There's Edmund, who just graduated from Rada. And Ferdie. "Who is also a very good actor" says Kingsley. "Jasmine is an artist. And Thomas may go into teaching. They are all very creative." Last year Kingsley married the 30-year-old German advertising executive Alexandra Christmann. But Kingsley doesn't like to talk about anything but his art. Like he says, "We really have to guard our privacy so carefully."

Kingsley's new film - House Of Sand And Fog - is all about family. But when I ask whether Kingsley is a family man, he looks uncomfortable. "You know what?" he says. "I'm very articulate at describing my character in the film. And my description of him is my performance of him. Maybe there are certain muscles or circuits in my brain that are totally dormant. I have no interest in describing myself because I don't have that sense of self."

In other words, mind your own business. "I have a sense of Isaak Sterne [Schindler's List]. I have a sense of Don Logan [Sexy Beast]. I have a sense of Behrani [House Of Sand And Fog]. These are portraits that I paint. I say ‘here you are' [at which point he wrestles an imaginary canvas from an imaginary easel]. So if I were to try and answer your question, I would start inventing things. Just to keep you happy. I like people to be happy. But I would be making things up."

Although he might prefer to call himself, variously, "a wizard", "an alchemist", and "a storyteller", Kingsley is a lovey. When he delivered his Hamlet at the RSC, he should, if his high-sounding pronouncements are anything to go by, have sucked in his cheeks, put one hand on his breast and looked into middle distance while soliloquising. Instead, he was understated and brilliant. "I wanted to be the most honest, most pure Hamlet, bathed in white light. To touch the audience in a way only Hamlet can. To stretch them. To.." Etc.

His performance in House Of Sand And Fog is equally understated - he even rations his eye movements. "Vadim [Perelman, the director] and I signed a pact that if I could do less on each take, that's what I would do." He made a similar pact with Stephen Speilberg on Schindler's List. "You know the story of the Japanese painter? When he's 90 he hopes he can achieve a landscape with just three strokes of his brush. Is my acting getting better? I hope so. But I definitely think I'm getting simpler."

In House Of Sand And Fog, Kingsley plays Behrani, an Iranian Colonel who once bought aircraft for the Shah. Now he is reduced to pumping gas and picking up trash for a living. When a neighbouring alcoholic (Jennifer Connelly) is evicted from her property, Behrani jumps at the chance to buy his respectability. But it all ends in tragedy. "When people come to talk to me after the film, I feel like a counsellor" says Kingsley. "It is uncompromising."

And that rather delights him. "Did you know they rewrote King Lear in Victorian times? So that Cordelia married Edgar? And they rewrote Romeo and Juliet so that the couple lived?" Today, it is the financiers and the focus groups who rewrite the endings. "That's why I loved doing [the American mini-series] Anne Frank. I played the father. I remember, on the set, we used to say to each other, with glittering eyes, ‘This is one ending they can't change'. We were empowered by that."

But he's not just interested in the tragic. He likes the comic too. By that I don't mean his Frank Ford in "Merry Wives of Windsor". Kingsley has a real sense of humour (or so I have heard), which was why he accepted the role of Hood in this autumn's Thunderbirds. His character invades Tracy Island, home of International Rescue, in order to mastermind world domination. "I'm an entertainer. Shock horror, I'm not a serious actor. I do accept that I'm an entertainer, you know."

Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Bhanji, the son of a Kenyan-Asian father and an English mother. His childhood, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, was spent dreaming of the bright lights of Hollywood. At the age of five, he imagined a camera crew were following him round. "And I remember sitting in the cinema - quite near the front - and being totally thrilled by the opening titles of a Columbia feature film. It was the way that lady was holding the torch."

It was like there a historic inevitability he would end up famous. "I think every child finds fame very attractive" says Kingsley. "Because part of the survival mechanism of the child is to be seen and heard. If they're not seen and heard they feel danger. For me, the joy of being seen and heard grew into being the Danny Kaye of the family. That's what I was called. I would entertain the family with jokes, songs, stories - and do a devastating impersonation of the last person who left the room."

The young Krishna had imagination. "I could daydream" he says. "Maybe we would go to a restaurant as a family. I could hear a voice across the table. The voice would drift across ‘nah nah nah nah'. And it would get louder ‘Nah Nah Nah Nah'. Until I realised it was my father saying ‘Do you want to go and sit with them?' I would never sit facing my family because I was totally curious about what the other tables were doing. Their mannerisms. Their dynamic. I would just sit and stare."

The name Krishna Bhanji wasn't an obstacle until he auditioned for RADA. "The burser came in with a clipboard" says Kingsley. "‘Kristina Blange?' he shouted, and we all looked round. ‘Kristina Blange?' I thought ‘God, that's my awful handwriting. So I had to say ‘I'm Kristina Blange'. The wind was completely taken out of my sails." Because of that ("and because every casting director in the land would expect me to speak fluent Hindi") he decided to change his name.

The irony was that he changed his name to Ben Kingsley - and then got cast as Mahatma Gandhi. He prepared for the Oscar-winning role by reading all 23 volumes of the leader's collected works, taking up yoga and learning to spin cotton. Some of the villagers in India thought he actually was Gandhi. "Only the very old villagers" he says. "They wanted to touch me as an icon. Not as his reincarnation. I don't meant to sound disparaging about the villagers. Please esponge that reference."

He is a moral man with principles. And he was prepared to fight for those principles when, during the filming of Schindler's List, he overheard a racist slur in a hotel in Krakow. "No blows were landed, but it's not an incident I like to refer to because it reflects so badly on who we are" he says. "It's not about me. It's about the tragedy of a man having to be anti-Semitic in a public place to justify his impoverished existence. It's very sad."

On-set, he takes his leading man role very seriously. "If there's bullying," he says, "or discourtesy, then the leading man has a duty to say ‘Stop this'." He is, of course, speaking from experience. "I remember the way a director was addressing himself to a fellow actor was insulting. And it was a law of diminishing returns because the actor's confidence was shrinking before my eyes. So I intervened, and said the director would not be able to complete the film unless he changed his methods."

Kingsley has never allowed himself to be typecast - part luck, part design. And he's blessed with a very adaptable face. "Take Meyer Lansky in Bugsy" he says "and Isaak Sterne in Schindler's List. In terms of their physionomy, they were identical. But I put wire-framed glasses on one. And an expensive suit on the other. And my face changed. My face is plastic. I think I'm like a portrait artist. But the portrait is made of my voice, my body and my imagination. The portrait is made of me."

When Kingsley rang from Los Angeles, he was different. He still spoke deliberately, and said ‘Truly' a lot. But he was more irritable. "My focus is being pulled nine different ways, Richard. I'm looking after my home thousands of miles away, I'm moving into my new home in LA. And I'm having costume fittings. I can't tell you what an incredibly difficult day it is. We have lives you see. We have lives that we have to lead, as well as everything else. A balancing act. Okay?"

The poor, poor man was preparing to give his very being to Mrs Harris, a bio drama based on the sensational 1980s murder. Kingsley plays Herman Tarnower, a philandering cardiologist who is killed by his speed-addicted homicidal wife. And clearly he wasn't in the mood to chat. "I'm on the run" he says. "Really on the run. Every time I put the phone down, I have to pick up my script and study. No-one else can learn my lines for me. And I have to learn my lines soon. Very soon."

He didn't want to talk about his Method. "I don't do masses of Method-style preparation. But if people want to believe I do, that's fine. I can say it till I'm blue in the face, but nobody believes me. So there we are." But Gandhi? And all that cotton spinning cotton and yoga? "Twenty years ago Richard? You know. And a lot of pressure, on my first film, to do something right? You progress from there. You don't always use the same methods."

Clearly, he was homesick. And missing his manor house in the Oxfordshire village of Spelsbury. "I used to quite enjoy the status of nomad" he says. "Thinking it had rather romantic connotations. But in fact it really does not. Truly, it does not. Now I love the smell of wood smoke in my house. And I love the gardens, the ancientness of the house and the village, and the fact that it is surrounded by farmers. It is immensely grounding."

He loves to walk across the fields, rehearsing lines. He loves to watch the hedgerows as they change with the seasons. And he loves to end up in the village church, and listen to the bellringers. He really does love rural life. Heck, why else would he sign the ‘Keep Our Pool' petition in Chipping Norton? Or play the novelist D H Lawrence in a local performance of The Tarnished Phoenix to raise money for the Village Hall fund?

"But my desire for privacy is directly related to how public the rest of my life is" he says. "All of my acting is given away. But my privacy is a refuge that entirely and utterly belongs to me." Which is why you won't find his weddings sponsored by OK! or Now. "To be not acting is replenishing. Therefore the private life where I can not be a craftsman all the time - and not filter everything through a character - is replenishing too. I need that balance."

We should respect his desire to replenish - and respect is all that Kingsley wants. That's why he was thrilled to be knighted in 2002. "It is a very, very strong embrace. It is the opposite of ‘Oh you've gone Hollywood then'. It is ‘You are British'. And I love that. I love it. It makes me feel very cherished." He is visibly moved. "Like when I was a child. It's to do with being seen and heard. If the country says ‘We've seen you and we've heard you', then it really can't get much better than that."



		Dear Sir Sir Ben Kingsley offers me his hand - his left hand. Not to shake, but to hold. Graciously he bows his head and whispers "Hello". It's like meeting the Pope (if the Pope ever dressed head-to-toe in black Armani). I assume that he is busy Living the Part and Building the Character for some Pope-like role in a future production. He isn't. He offered me his left hand because he dropped a dumb-bell on his right. And the Pope-like manner? It's just Sir Ben. He has rushed here from a photographer's studio in Soho. He hates being photographed, unless it's in character. "I am so profoundly an actor, that if I get caught between what is acting and what is not acting, like being photographed, I just have to go neutral." And he remains resolutely neutral until his son, Edmund, rings on the mobile. The couple excitedly arrange to meet at Groucho's, and Kingsley blows his son a kiss goodbye. Then he returns to neutral. Kingsley has four children from his first two marriages. There's Edmund, who just graduated from Rada. And Ferdie. "Who is also a very good actor" says Kingsley. "Jasmine is an artist. And Thomas may go into teaching. They are all very creative." Last year Kingsley married the 30-year-old German advertising executive Alexandra Christmann. But Kingsley doesn't like to talk about anything but his art. Like he says, "We really have to guard our privacy so carefully." Kingsley's new film - House Of Sand And Fog - is all about family. But when I ask whether Kingsley is a family man, he looks uncomfortable. "You know what?" he says. "I'm very articulate at describing my character in the film. And my description of him is my performance of him. Maybe there are certain muscles or circuits in my brain that are totally dormant. I have no interest in describing myself because I don't have that sense of self." In other words, mind your own business. "I have a sense of Isaak Sterne [Schindler's List]. I have a sense of Don Logan [Sexy Beast]. I have a sense of Behrani [House Of Sand And Fog]. These are portraits that I paint. I say ‘here you are' [at which point he wrestles an imaginary canvas from an imaginary easel]. So if I were to try and answer your question, I would start inventing things. Just to keep you happy. I like people to be happy. But I would be making things up." Although he might prefer to call himself, variously, "a wizard", "an alchemist", and "a storyteller", Kingsley is a lovey. When he delivered his Hamlet at the RSC, he should, if his high-sounding pronouncements are anything to go by, have sucked in his cheeks, put one hand on his breast and looked into middle distance while soliloquising. Instead, he was understated and brilliant. "I wanted to be the most honest, most pure Hamlet, bathed in white light. To touch the audience in a way only Hamlet can. To stretch them. To.." Etc. His performance in House Of Sand And Fog is equally understated - he even rations his eye movements. "Vadim [Perelman, the director] and I signed a pact that if I could do less on each take, that's what I would do." He made a similar pact with Stephen Speilberg on Schindler's List. "You know the story of the Japanese painter? When he's 90 he hopes he can achieve a landscape with just three strokes of his brush. Is my acting getting better? I hope so. But I definitely think I'm getting simpler." In House Of Sand And Fog, Kingsley plays Behrani, an Iranian Colonel who once bought aircraft for the Shah. Now he is reduced to pumping gas and picking up trash for a living. When a neighbouring alcoholic (Jennifer Connelly) is evicted from her property, Behrani jumps at the chance to buy his respectability. But it all ends in tragedy. "When people come to talk to me after the film, I feel like a counsellor" says Kingsley. "It is uncompromising." And that rather delights him. "Did you know they rewrote King Lear in Victorian times? So that Cordelia married Edgar? And they rewrote Romeo and Juliet so that the couple lived?" Today, it is the financiers and the focus groups who rewrite the endings. "That's why I loved doing [the American mini-series] Anne Frank. I played the father. I remember, on the set, we used to say to each other, with glittering eyes, ‘This is one ending they can't change'. We were empowered by that." But he's not just interested in the tragic. He likes the comic too. By that I don't mean his Frank Ford in "Merry Wives of Windsor". Kingsley has a real sense of humour (or so I have heard), which was why he accepted the role of Hood in this autumn's Thunderbirds. His character invades Tracy Island, home of International Rescue, in order to mastermind world domination. "I'm an entertainer. Shock horror, I'm not a serious actor. I do accept that I'm an entertainer, you know." Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Bhanji, the son of a Kenyan-Asian father and an English mother. His childhood, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, was spent dreaming of the bright lights of Hollywood. At the age of five, he imagined a camera crew were following him round. "And I remember sitting in the cinema - quite near the front - and being totally thrilled by the opening titles of a Columbia feature film. It was the way that lady was holding the torch." It was like there a historic inevitability he would end up famous. "I think every child finds fame very attractive" says Kingsley. "Because part of the survival mechanism of the child is to be seen and heard. If they're not seen and heard they feel danger. For me, the joy of being seen and heard grew into being the Danny Kaye of the family. That's what I was called. I would entertain the family with jokes, songs, stories - and do a devastating impersonation of the last person who left the room." The young Krishna had imagination. "I could daydream" he says. "Maybe we would go to a restaurant as a family. I could hear a voice across the table. The voice would drift across ‘nah nah nah nah'. And it would get louder ‘Nah Nah Nah Nah'. Until I realised it was my father saying ‘Do you want to go and sit with them?' I would never sit facing my family because I was totally curious about what the other tables were doing. Their mannerisms. Their dynamic. I would just sit and stare." The name Krishna Bhanji wasn't an obstacle until he auditioned for RADA. "The burser came in with a clipboard" says Kingsley. "‘Kristina Blange?' he shouted, and we all looked round. ‘Kristina Blange?' I thought ‘God, that's my awful handwriting. So I had to say ‘I'm Kristina Blange'. The wind was completely taken out of my sails." Because of that ("and because every casting director in the land would expect me to speak fluent Hindi") he decided to change his name. The irony was that he changed his name to Ben Kingsley - and then got cast as Mahatma Gandhi. He prepared for the Oscar-winning role by reading all 23 volumes of the leader's collected works, taking up yoga and learning to spin cotton. Some of the villagers in India thought he actually was Gandhi. "Only the very old villagers" he says. "They wanted to touch me as an icon. Not as his reincarnation. I don't meant to sound disparaging about the villagers. Please esponge that reference." He is a moral man with principles. And he was prepared to fight for those principles when, during the filming of Schindler's List, he overheard a racist slur in a hotel in Krakow. "No blows were landed, but it's not an incident I like to refer to because it reflects so badly on who we are" he says. "It's not about me. It's about the tragedy of a man having to be anti-Semitic in a public place to justify his impoverished existence. It's very sad." On-set, he takes his leading man role very seriously. "If there's bullying," he says, "or discourtesy, then the leading man has a duty to say ‘Stop this'." He is, of course, speaking from experience. "I remember the way a director was addressing himself to a fellow actor was insulting. And it was a law of diminishing returns because the actor's confidence was shrinking before my eyes. So I intervened, and said the director would not be able to complete the film unless he changed his methods." Kingsley has never allowed himself to be typecast - part luck, part design. And he's blessed with a very adaptable face. "Take Meyer Lansky in Bugsy" he says "and Isaak Sterne in Schindler's List. In terms of their physionomy, they were identical. But I put wire-framed glasses on one. And an expensive suit on the other. And my face changed. My face is plastic. I think I'm like a portrait artist. But the portrait is made of my voice, my body and my imagination. The portrait is made of me." When Kingsley rang from Los Angeles, he was different. He still spoke deliberately, and said ‘Truly' a lot. But he was more irritable. "My focus is being pulled nine different ways, Richard. I'm looking after my home thousands of miles away, I'm moving into my new home in LA. And I'm having costume fittings. I can't tell you what an incredibly difficult day it is. We have lives you see. We have lives that we have to lead, as well as everything else. A balancing act. Okay?" The poor, poor man was preparing to give his very being to Mrs Harris, a bio drama based on the sensational 1980s murder. Kingsley plays Herman Tarnower, a philandering cardiologist who is killed by his speed-addicted homicidal wife. And clearly he wasn't in the mood to chat. "I'm on the run" he says. "Really on the run. Every time I put the phone down, I have to pick up my script and study. No-one else can learn my lines for me. And I have to learn my lines soon. Very soon." He didn't want to talk about his Method. "I don't do masses of Method-style preparation. But if people want to believe I do, that's fine. I can say it till I'm blue in the face, but nobody believes me. So there we are." But Gandhi? And all that cotton spinning cotton and yoga? "Twenty years ago Richard? You know. And a lot of pressure, on my first film, to do something right? You progress from there. You don't always use the same methods." Clearly, he was homesick. And missing his manor house in the Oxfordshire village of Spelsbury. "I used to quite enjoy the status of nomad" he says. "Thinking it had rather romantic connotations. But in fact it really does not. Truly, it does not. Now I love the smell of wood smoke in my house. And I love the gardens, the ancientness of the house and the village, and the fact that it is surrounded by farmers. It is immensely grounding." He loves to walk across the fields, rehearsing lines. He loves to watch the hedgerows as they change with the seasons. And he loves to end up in the village church, and listen to the bellringers. He really does love rural life. Heck, why else would he sign the ‘Keep Our Pool' petition in Chipping Norton? Or play the novelist D H Lawrence in a local performance of The Tarnished Phoenix to raise money for the Village Hall fund? "But my desire for privacy is directly related to how public the rest of my life is" he says. "All of my acting is given away. But my privacy is a refuge that entirely and utterly belongs to me." Which is why you won't find his weddings sponsored by OK! or Now. "To be not acting is replenishing. Therefore the private life where I can not be a craftsman all the time - and not filter everything through a character - is replenishing too. I need that balance." We should respect his desire to replenish - and respect is all that Kingsley wants. That's why he was thrilled to be knighted in 2002. "It is a very, very strong embrace. It is the opposite of ‘Oh you've gone Hollywood then'. It is ‘You are British'. And I love that. I love it. It makes me feel very cherished." He is visibly moved. "Like when I was a child. It's to do with being seen and heard. If the country says ‘We've seen you and we've heard you', then it really can't get much better than that."

		© Richard Johnson 2000 - 2009