Ben Kingsley

Info

Full Name: Ben Kingsley
Date of birth: December 31, 1943 (82 years old)
Location: Scarborough, Yorkshire, England
Country: UK
Height: 1,73m

Ben Kingsley has been active for 44 years, participating in 63 movies that average a 6.0/10 score.

Videos eCartelera

Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

In the mid sixties a young actor from Salford named Krishna Bhanji had a decision to make. Dick James, the man who published the Beatles' songs, wanted to groom him into a pop star; the theatre wanted him too. He chose Shakespeare, and British cinema should be grateful he did. The world now knows him as Sir Ben Kingsley, owner of one of the most remarkable careers any English actor has put together.

Born Krishna Pandit Bhanji on 31 December 1943 in Snainton, a village in Yorkshire, he was the son of a doctor born in Zanzibar to an Indian Gujarati family and an English actress and model. He grew up in Pendlebury, near Manchester, and attended Manchester Grammar School. Convinced a foreign name was costing him work, he built a new one from his grandfather's nickname in the spice trade, King Clove. By his own account, the jobs started arriving as soon as he changed it.

Before fame there was 'Coronation Street', where he appeared as Ron Jenkins in the mid sixties, and then the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1967, where he stayed for over a decade and worked his way up to Hamlet. His film debut came in 1972 with the thriller 'Fear Is the Key'.

'Gandhi' and an Oscar at the first attempt

Richard Attenborough had spent twenty years trying to get his Gandhi film made when he found his lead in this half Indian Shakespearean. Kingsley treated the part as a calling: he lost weight, took up yoga, learned to work a spinning wheel and lived inside the Mahatma's speeches. 'Gandhi' (1982) swept eight Oscars, and its star took the Academy Award for Best Actor along with the BAFTA and the Golden Globe. His recording of 'The Words of Gandhi' later won him a Grammy, and India gave him the Padma Shri.

He was 39, and it was only his second cinema feature. The rest of the eighties struggled to match it. He was Shostakovich in 'Testimony', appeared in Pinter's 'Betrayal' opposite Jeremy Irons, and played a long suffering Dr. Watson to Michael Caine's fraudulent Sherlock in the comedy 'Without a Clue'.

Bugsy, Schindler and Don Logan

The nineties put him back at the centre of things. He was gangster Meyer Lansky in 'Bugsy', earning a second Oscar nomination, and the quiet conscience of Steven Spielberg's 'Schindler's List' as the accountant Itzhak Stern, at the elbow of Liam Neeson. There were lighter jobs in 'Dave' and 'Searching for Bobby Fischer', and a chilling one as the alleged torturer of 'Death and the Maiden' for Roman Polanski, who later cast him as Fagin in 'Oliver Twist (2005)'.

Then came the performance British audiences still quote at him. In 'Sexy Beast' (2000), Jonathan Glazer's debut, his Don Logan flies down to the Costa del Sol to bully Ray Winstone's retired safecracker out of the sunbed and back into crime. The foul mouthed psychopath brought him a third Oscar nomination, an award that went to Benicio Del Toro that year, and a permanent place on every list of great screen villains. Kingsley has always insisted he based him on his grandmother.

A fourth nomination followed for 'House of Sand and Fog' (2003), in which he played an exiled Iranian colonel gambling everything on a repossessed house. Four Oscar nominations, one win, and counting. Between those two nominations he was also the narrator of Spielberg's 'Artificial Intelligence: AI'.

The man who plays real people

Few actors have worked through so many borrowed lives. He has been Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and Anne Frank's father Otto in television films that brought him several Emmy nominations, cinema pioneer Georges Méliès in Martin Scorsese's 'Hugo', made after their 'Shutter Island', Adolf Eichmann opposite Oscar Isaac's Mossad agent in 'Operation Finale', and Salvador Dalí himself in 'Daliland'. Add the Persian sage Ibn Sina in 'The Physician' and two films for Spanish director Isabel Coixet, 'Elegy' with Penélope Cruz and 'Learning to Drive' with Patricia Clarkson.

He has never been precious about the other half of the job. He was the villain of 'Prince of Persia: The Sands of time' with Jake Gyllenhaal, sent up tyranny with Sacha Baron Cohen in 'The Dictator', purred his way through Kipling's Bagheera in 'The Jungle Book' and voiced the villain of 'The Boxtrolls'.

He faced Morgan Freeman as rival crime bosses in 'Lucky Number Slevin' and has taken paydays as unashamed as 'BloodRayne'. He rarely says no to a shoot.

His most beloved creation in that world is Trevor Slattery, the washed up actor hired to impersonate the terrorist Mandarin in 'Iron Man 3'. The character proved so popular that he returned in 'Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings' and now fronts 'Wonder Man', Marvel's Hollywood satire with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, which premiered in January 2026 and has already been renewed. The series even lets Marvel poke fun at the fake Mandarin twist that once divided its fans.

In between he appeared in 'The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar', the Wes Anderson short from Roald Dahl that won an Oscar, and in 2025 he was Ibrahim, the retired psychiatrist of 'The Thursday Murder Club', Chris Columbus' Netflix hit from Richard Osman's novels, one of the fastest selling crime series Britain has produced, sleuthing alongside Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie.

Sir Ben, four marriages and no retirement

The Queen knighted him in 2002 for services to the British film industry, with the honour announced on 31 December 2001, his 58th birthday. He said it meant more to him than winning the Oscar, and he takes the title seriously: for a while he was even billed on posters as Sir Ben Kingsley. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame followed in 2010.

He has married four times: actress Angela Morant, his wife from 1966 and mother of his first two children; theatre director Alison Sutcliffe, mother of actors Edmund Kingsley and Ferdinand Kingsley, the latter familiar to ITV viewers as the royal chef Francatelli in 'Victoria'; Alexandra Christmann, a marriage that barely lasted two years; and, since 2007, Brazilian actress Daniela Lavender.

At 82 he has a Marvel series just renewed, a hit cosy crime franchise waiting on him and a diary with no gaps in it. Not bad going for a name he had to invent.