The character portrait Ben Kingsley is most proud of: “The response has been so strong and gratifying”
Sitting comfortably alongside the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen, and Patrick Stewart, the legendary Ben Kingsley is a true British acting icon, known and loved for his work on the theatre stage just as much as he is admired for bringing some of the most phenomenal character portraits to the big screen.
In 1967, at the age of 17, Kingsley joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and established himself as one of the most acclaimed classic theatre performers of his generation with stunning performances over the next 15 years in the likes of Richard III, The Tempest, Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing. Before long, though, the cinema world came calling, and Kingsley was soon to deliver one of his most memorable roles.
For his effort as Mahatma Gandhi in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 biopic, Kingsley won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. However, the Yorkshire-born actor did not rest on his laurels and proceeded to give some truly commendable turns in the likes of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Barry Levinson’s Bugsy and Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast.
It was shortly after playing the fearsome Don Logan in Sexy Beast that Kingsley gave yet another of his most acclaimed efforts. In Vadim Perelman’s 2003 drama House of Sand and Fog, Kingsley played the character Colonel Massoud Behrani in a movie based on the novel of the same name by Andre Dubus III.
Also starring Jennifer Connolly, Ron Eldard, Frances Fisher and Shohreh Aghdashloo, House of Sand and Fog tells of the battle for the ownership of a Northern California house between a young woman and an immigrant Iranian family. It was a film that left a deep impression on Kingsley, especially considering the strong emotional pull that it has on its audience.
Discussing where House of Sand and Fog and the portrayal of Behrani ranks in terms of his other notable performances, Kingsley once told the BBC, “With Attenborough, Spielberg, and Jonathan Glazer, I’ve had the most extraordinary opportunities. But I think that Behrani is possibly the portrait I’m most fond of in my whole career. Maybe because it’s recent, maybe because it’s fresh, or maybe it’s because the response has been so strong and gratifying.”
Evidently, Kingsley cherished his role in Perelman’s movie, and it was an effort that saw him nominated for the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, while Aghdashloo got the nod for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ and James Horner’s score was also heralded that year’s Oscars ceremony.
One of the key things surrounding his love for House of Sand and Fog was its moral ambiguity and position of allowing the audience to choose for themselves as to the crux of the narrative matter. “We don’t have the polarity of good and bad in this film; we’re exploring that very rich and extraordinary area in between,” Kingsley explained. “Usually, once a good element is introduced in a film, it never changes. And once a bad element is introduced, that never changes.”
Indeed, in most movies, “the good stay good and the bad stay bad”, but House of Sand and Fog pitted two starkly different collections of people against one another without ever really positing which of them is right. It’s for those reasons and the fact that he was given such an interesting character to play – a former Iranian military leader turned to menial jobs as an immigrant to America – that left Ben Kingsley with such a fond feeling in his heart for the film.
