Krishna Pandit Bhanji
He was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji on the 31st of December 1943 in Snainton, a small village in the North Riding of Yorkshire. His mother, Anna Lyna Mary Goodman, was an English actress and model. His father, Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, was born in Zanzibar to a Khoja Gujarati family originally from Jamnagar in India.
The family settled in Pendlebury, on the Salford side of the Manchester border. It was here, in the terraced streets and industrial landscape of post-war Lancashire, that Krishna Bhanji grew up. The same streets that Lowry painted. The same chimneys, the same brick, the same sky.
He attended Manchester Grammar School, where his classmate was another future actor, Robert Powell. From there he went to De La Salle College in Salford, where he threw himself into amateur dramatics in Manchester. The college later named a theatre after him. By the time he made his professional stage debut at 23, he had already spent years learning the craft in the halls and theatres of Greater Manchester.
The Name
At some point in the 1960s, Krishna Bhanji became Ben Kingsley. It was not a decision he made lightly, and it was not one he made because he was ashamed of his heritage. He made it because the British entertainment industry of the 1960s could not see past a name.
He auditioned as Krishna Bhanji. He was told his performance was beautiful but they didn't quite know how to place him. He changed his name, walked across the road, auditioned again, and was offered the job immediately. The talent was identical. The name was different. That was enough.
It is a story that says more about the industry he entered than it does about the man himself. And it is worth remembering every time someone talks about representation on screen as though it is a modern invention. Ben Kingsley was navigating those waters sixty years ago, in a Britain that wasn't ready to hear the name Krishna Pandit Bhanji on a theatre marquee.
The Royal Shakespeare Company
In 1967, Kingsley auditioned for Trevor Nunn and was accepted into the Royal Shakespeare Company. His West End debut came that same year, in As You Like It at the Aldwych Theatre. He made his Broadway debut in 1971 as Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
For the next fifteen years, the stage was his world. He built a reputation as one of the most intense and committed actors in British theatre, disappearing into roles with a physical and psychological precision that marked him out from his peers. He was not interested in being a personality. He was interested in being other people.
This was the training ground. Fifteen years of Shakespeare, fifteen years of classical theatre, fifteen years of learning how to inhabit a character so completely that the audience forgets they are watching an actor. When the biggest role of his life came along, he was ready for it because he had spent a decade and a half getting ready in the hardest school there is.
"I told the Queen that winning an Oscar pales into insignificance. I'm fascinated by the ancient, by mythology, by these islands and their tradition of story telling. I feel that I am a story teller and to receive a knighthood is really recognition of that."
Gandhi
In 1982, Richard Attenborough cast Ben Kingsley as Mahatma Gandhi in a film that had taken twenty years to get made. It was a role that demanded everything: physical transformation, spiritual depth, political understanding, and the ability to carry an epic three-hour film almost entirely on one man's shoulders.
Kingsley delivered one of the greatest screen performances of the twentieth century. He lost weight. He shaved his head. He studied Gandhi's movements, his speech patterns, his silences. The result was not an impression but an inhabitation. When the film was released, audiences in India wept. They believed they were watching Gandhi.
He won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He won the BAFTA. He won the Golden Globe. The following year, he won a Grammy for the spoken word recording The Words of Gandhi. He also received the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honours. A lad from Pendlebury, honoured by the country his father's family came from, for playing the man who freed it.
After Gandhi
A lesser actor might have been defined by a single role. Kingsley refused to be. In 1993, he played Itzhak Stern opposite Liam Neeson in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, delivering a performance of such quiet, dignified restraint that it anchored one of the most important films ever made.
Then, in 2000, he played Don Logan in Sexy Beast. It was as far from Gandhi as it was possible to get: a foul-mouthed, terrifying London gangster who dominates every scene through sheer menace. He was nominated for another Oscar. The range was astonishing. The same man who had embodied the apostle of non-violence was now the most frightening thing on screen.
He received a third Oscar nomination for House of Sand and Fog in 2003. He played Georges Méliès in Martin Scorsese's Hugo. He turned up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Trevor Slattery in Iron Man 3, a role so unexpected and so perfectly played that Marvel brought him back years later in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
He was knighted in the 2002 New Year Honours for services to the British film industry. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010. Four Oscar nominations. A career spanning six decades. And it all started in Pendlebury, in the amateur dramatic societies of Manchester, in the classrooms of Manchester Grammar School and De La Salle College.
Krishna Pandit Bhanji. A Salford lad. One of the greatest actors who ever lived.