bed exhausted. I neglected my academic
life, although I went to a very good school.
But I felt an enormous pressure to lighten
the house, because both my parents were
depressives. I was called the Danny Kaye
of the family. And we become our nick-
names. We really do.”
And thus, a performer was born. At the
age of 19, he visited the Royal Shakespeare
Company to watch Ian Holm portray
Richard III, and he was so riveted that he
passed out cold.
“It was absolutely hypnotizing,” he
recalls. “His ambition, his twisted body,
his amazing voice. I didn’t have a seat so
I stood at the back of the auditorium. It
was a very hot June day, and I just keeled
over. And I was revived and given a glass of
water by one of the ushers, and I watched
the rest of the show. Then I went to the
stage door and spoke to a lot of the actors
afterwards. I was able to have a drink with
them in the pub opposite the theater. I
just said, ‘I’ve got to do this.’ They were
gods to me. Gods.”
Unlike most wannabe actors who
struggle to get their foot in the door, King-
sley never spent time waiting tables or
donning chicken suits outside of fast-food
joints. He was a success from start.
“I’ve never done anything else other
than act,” he says. “I didn’t go to drama
school. I went straight into the deep
end: Shakespeare. And the miracle was
that maybe two or three years later, I
was actually standing on that stage as a
professional actor. With a wage packet
at the end of every week. Working with
amazing people.”
BECOMING SIR BEN
n 1982, he won the
Best Actor Oscar
for his second film,
Gandhi, beating
out Dustin Ho;-
man for Tootsie,
Paul Newman in
The Verdict, Peter
O’Toole in My Favorite Year and Jack Lem-
mon in Missing. Vincent Canby wrote in
The New York Times, “In Ben Kingsley,
the young Anglo-Indian actor who plays
the title role, the film also has a splendid
performer who discovers the humor, the
frankness, the quickness of mind that
make the film far more moving than you
might think possible.”
