Ben Kingsley springs up from his chair like an Olympic gymnast when we meet at a plush hotel in London. He pushes his arm forward in the manner of a soldier and gives a sturdy but friendly handshake. He is the perfect host, making sure I have adequate sustenance before we sit down. His demeanour makes me feel like I've known the man for years rather than minutes. The 65-year-old actor has been tremendously busy recently. He's been filming the American coming-of-age tale The Wackness as well as Elegy, an adaptation of Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal. He has also entered into his fourth marriage, to a woman half his age. Art seems to be mirroring life in his latest films. The older Kingsley gets, the younger his partners seem to be.
His first marriage, to the actress Angela Morant, lasted a decade and begat two children, Thomas and Jasmine, before ending in 1972. He had two more sons, Edmund and Ferdinand, during his marriage to the theatre director Alison Sutcliffe, which lasted until 1993. Soon after, he entered into cohabitation with the actress Kate Townsend, 30 years his junior. That lasted until he met the German socialite Alexandra Christmann in a Berlin restaurant, who became his third wife. They divorced in 2003 after Kingsley discovered pictures of her embracing another man on the internet. He did not lick his wounds for long and last September married Daniela Barbosa, a little-known Brazilian actress almost half his age.
In Elegy, Kingsley plays a cultural critic and author of books deriding monogamy. He's forced to reconsider his misogynistic views when Penélope Cruz walks into his life and demands undivided attention. Then, in The Wackness, he plays a psychotherapist whose marriage to Famke Janssen is on the rocks. He thinks the best way of beating the blues is by playing around and is soon embracing a girl three times younger than him, played by the 22-year-old former child superstar Mary-Kate Olsen.
I put it to the actor that he seems fascinated by troubled relationships involving men who have given up on the ideal of romantic love. This is met with an almighty pause as he weighs up his response, before he starts: "I think the struggle is beautiful, the human struggle. I don't see it as an ugly thing. I see the journey as almost mythological - it's a struggle to find our equals. Equals can come as man and child such as in The Wackness, or as in Elegy - the novel it is based on by Philip Roth is called The Dying Animal, and after we've seen the film or you've read the book you wonder who exactly is the dying animal. Finding that equal partner, that perfect partner, might take a lot longer than certain magazines that we can pull off the shelves and flick through can suggest."
Given that his leading ladies seem to be getting prettier with each passing year, I ask if he thinks he's been getting sexier with age. Kingsley quips, "That's a question for my wife!" We then get into a more serious discussion about how to approach romantic moments on screen. Kingsley reveals, "In scenes when we must have any emotional choreography, instead of me leading the dance, to use that metaphor, I always say to the lady, 'You lead'. You tell me how you want the scene to be choreographed."
Childishly, all that's going through my mind as Kingsley is speaking is "I'm talking to Gandhi!" It's a tad unfair to define a man by a single role he did more than a quarter of a century ago, especially as he has been wowing audiences with his mastery of his craft ever since he turned his back on his youthful musical aspirations (John Lennon and Ringo Starr were fans, apparently) in the 1960s. The English Bard dominated his career's formative years. He still enthuses, "When I read Shakespeare, I'm amazed that he wrote down exactly where to put all the pauses and breaths. I just keep asking myself, 'How did he know that all these centuries later I'll be acting in this play?'" Kingsley combined Shakespeare with parts on British television before he received international acclaim playing the inspirational Indian leader.
Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, the son of an Indian doctor and English fashion model, Kingsley became the first man of South East Asian descent to pick up the Best Actor Oscar. So closely was he associated with the role of Gandhi that it was only in 1993, a decade later, when he dominated the screen in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List that the enormity of his acting range began to be fully appreciated.
In Sexy Beast, the actor morphed into the violent, agitated criminal Don Logan, managing the incredible feat of making the formidable British actor Ray Winstone look meek. House of Sand and Fog soon followed with Kingsley playing an Iranian immigrant whose dreams of buying a grand American house are shattered. The actor still picked some rather dodgy parts (Thunderbirds, anyone?). To be fair, Kingsley doesn't hide the fact that he's taken on roles because of the number of zeros on the contract.
Kingsley was recognised for his services to acting and awarded a knighthood in 2001. However, when it was reported that the actor insisted on being called Sir Ben and was billed on the poster for Lucky Number Slevin as Sir Ben Kingsley, the actor had to fight off accusations that he was a pompous egomaniac. In response, the actor has been sending himself up with turns in The Sopranos and The Love Guru. He's especially proud of his performances in an episode of the popular gangster serial, and asks with a grin as wide as the Ganges, "Did you see The Sopranos? That is self-parody."
Doing comic turns helps him to relax. "I'm enjoying not having the whole moral dilemma of the film resting on my shoulders as I did in The House of Sand and Fog, as I did in Schindler's List, as I certainly did in Gandhi and many other films. I also want to be more reckless in roles. I think that as you get older and more popular or successful or whatever you want to call it, then I hope, like painters, that you allow yourself to be a little more carefree."
He uses painting as a metaphor several times. He adds, "I think I'm becoming something of a portrait artist as an actor because the camera really is portrait, it's not a great landscape painting, like theatre is landscape." Despite arguing that "so much rubbish is spoken about acting", once Kingsley starts talking about his job, he can't stop. He says that his drive to act is down to "a combination of things that come together in an actor that I find very compelling. It's almost shaman-like, a religious quality and I'm sure that actors 1,000 years ago would have been priests or destroyed as witches. There is an almost religious need to tell a story to people."
This brings into question Kingsley's relationship with religion. His mother is from Jewish heritage and his father Muslim and he's best known for playing a Hindu. He says, "Religion plays a big part in my life but I couldn't define it. I couldn't say this is where I go to worship, this is what I bow to, but I know there is something. The human creature is a spiritual creature, but there is no focus of worship or particular group of people who interpret that power to me in order for me to appreciate and understand it. I'm not connected to any particular faith, but I think I'm religious. I'm fascinated by the human dance, patterns of human behaviour, evolution, our relationship with the universe, ideas that I come across that I find beautiful, ideas I've invented myself that I find frightening and interesting."
When not mulling over the meaning of existence, Kingsley continues to entertain. The actor has no immediate plans to slow down and says that he'll continue as long as good scripts keep arriving through the post. The scripts he likes are the ones where "I've no idea what I'm going to do next until get a physical tingling when I read the first two pages of script. Then I hear a voice in my head that tells me it's the next one."
