When John Lennon urged Ben Kingsley to trade acting for music: “We’d like to mould you”
You know an actor has range when he has played not just one of the most peaceful men in history but also one of the most terrifying, and that much is certainly true about Ben Kingsley.
The knight of the realm has played both Mahatma Gandhi, winning an Oscar in the process and Don Logan in Sexy Beast almost 20 years later, a man positively fizzing with murderous anger. But had things gone a little differently, with help from the Fab Four, Kingsley may never have been an actor at all.
Kingsley, now 81, has been an ever-present on screens for many decades after starting his career at the Royal Shakespeare company back in the mid-1960s, where he spent the next 15 years so so in productions including The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But just a year before that, after graduating from college, he was approached by the Beatles’ publisher who saw potential in him as a pop star.
As Kingsley explained: “Yes, John Lennon and Ringo saw a show I did and introduced me to Dick James, who was head of Northern Songs, the music publisher. He was encouraging and said, ‘We’d like to mould you’.”
“When you think of (science fiction novel) Ender’s Game, it’s a bit scary, the idea of being moulded,” he added. “I listened politely, but I also had an offer from the Chichester Festival to join them to do classical plays, and I decided to go there for the summer, which led to the Royal Shakespeare. So that opportunity drifted away quite quickly.”
Not that Kingsley ever regretted turning down the chance of being on bedroom walls, though. Kingsley’s mother was an actor and he followed in her footsteps, trading British theatres for Broadway and taking on the occasional role in TV soap operas. Eventually he was cast as Gandhi in the major film production by Richard Attenborough, a huge commercial success and a movie that received some eleven Oscar nominations, including a win for Kingsley.
Over the next decade, he got stuck into roles in British films, including the E M Forster adaptation Maurice with Hugh Grant in tow, and later popped up as a mob accountant in Bugsy, nabbing another Oscar nomination for his troubles.
Then along came the 1994 classic Schindler’s List, for which Steven Spielberg cast him as Holocaust survivor Itzhak Stern. It was a memorable turn in a landmark film that bagged Kingsley a Bafta nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
At the end of the decade, Kingsley was equally brilliant as a psychopathic, foul-mouthed underworld enforcer in Sexy Beast opposite Ray Winstone in Jonathan Glazer’s debut film. Glazer of course would go on to make his own superb Nazi film with 2023’s The Zone of Interest. Kingsley’s unhinged performance in the movie earned him another Oscar nomination and the film became a cult British classic.
Since then Kingsley’s kept busy on both sides of the Atlantic, turning up in Hollywood blockbusters and British dramas alike. He’s cropped up in Marvel’s Iron Man films as Trevor Slattery, a washed-up actor posing as a supervillain, and sparred on screen with Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s eerie prison thriller Shutter Island.
Next up, he’ll be seen in the first film version of Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, alongside Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan. The plot follows a gang of pensioners in a retirement home who take it upon themselves to crack cases the police either can’t handle – or can’t be arsed with.
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