Post by petrolino on Dec 21, 2019 0:16:44 GMT
Ben Kingsley
"Perhaps you did not come here to live like a Gypsy, but I did not come here to work like an Arab... to be treated like an Arab."
'Oriental Sadness' - The Hollies
Krishna Pandit Bhanji was born in Snainton, Yorkshire - he'd adopt his stage name, Ben Kingsley, at the beginning of the 1970s. His mother, Anna Lyna Mary (née Goodman), was a model and an actress. His father, Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, was a travelling doctor of Gujarati Indian descent. Kingsley was raised in Pendlebury, Lancashire, home to the Pendlebury Colliery, one of many coal mines firing local cotton mills across the county.
Kingsley was educated at Manchester Grammar School where one of his classmates was Salford-born actor Robert Powell. He continued his studies at De La Salle College in Salford which is now home to the Ben Kingsley Theatre. He got involved in amateur dramatics during his student days and caught the acting bug, making his professional stage debut soon after graduating. He took his first bow in London's West End at the Aldwych Theatre, where Laurence Olvier had directed plays in the 1940s and 1950s.
Kingsley was approached by pop svengali Dick James who wished to groom the thin, lizard-like performer for potential pop superstardom, having seen him perform in the stage musical 'A Smashing Day Out'. Kingsley played a singing narrator in 'A Smashing Day Out' and performed some of his own songs on his guitar, accompanied by old pal Robert Powell on harmonica. This production was expanded upon and restaged in London by music promoter Brian Epstein, with Hywel Bennett taking centre stage, and it once again proved to be a success. Despite this, Kingsley politely declined the offer to sign with James, despite encouragement from former Beatles John Lennon and Ringo Starr.
'Ben Kingsley’s own identity is complex and colourful. A Quaker, he was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire and grew up in Manchester as Krishna Bhanji. His father, a doctor, came from Kenya and was a Muslim of Gujarati Indian descent. His mother was an English model and actress, and part Jewish (his maternal grandmother was made pregnant by a Russian Jewish immigrant who abandoned her and, according to Kingsley, she became a vile anti-Semite). By the age of 54, his father had drunk and smoked himself to death; his mother died aged 96 in 2010.
As a young boy he was known to his friends as Krish. Krishna Bhanji was such a strange name, he says, a fiction in itself. “The first name is Hindu and the second name is Muslim. Such a name would never exist in the whole of the Indian sub-continent; it’s a nonsense name. It’s more invented than the name I chose.”
Does he still think of himself as Krishna? “I don’t think I think of myself. When I was on stage, I thought of myself as a landscape painter. Now that I’m blessed with a film career, I see myself as a portrait artist, and for many, many years I have signed my portraits Ben Kingsley. That’s who I am.”
After changing his name, he never looked back. “As soon as I changed my name, I got the jobs. I had one audition as Krishna Bhanji and they said, ‘Beautiful audition but we don’t quite know how to place you in our forthcoming season.’ I changed my name, crossed the road, and they said when can you start?”
Was that just racism? “I suppose it says more about the 1960s than anything else. But the irony is of course I changed my clunky invented Asian name to a more pronounceable, and acceptable, universal name in order to play Mahatma Gandhi. There’s your irony.”
As a young boy he was known to his friends as Krish. Krishna Bhanji was such a strange name, he says, a fiction in itself. “The first name is Hindu and the second name is Muslim. Such a name would never exist in the whole of the Indian sub-continent; it’s a nonsense name. It’s more invented than the name I chose.”
Does he still think of himself as Krishna? “I don’t think I think of myself. When I was on stage, I thought of myself as a landscape painter. Now that I’m blessed with a film career, I see myself as a portrait artist, and for many, many years I have signed my portraits Ben Kingsley. That’s who I am.”
After changing his name, he never looked back. “As soon as I changed my name, I got the jobs. I had one audition as Krishna Bhanji and they said, ‘Beautiful audition but we don’t quite know how to place you in our forthcoming season.’ I changed my name, crossed the road, and they said when can you start?”
Was that just racism? “I suppose it says more about the 1960s than anything else. But the irony is of course I changed my clunky invented Asian name to a more pronounceable, and acceptable, universal name in order to play Mahatma Gandhi. There’s your irony.”
- The Radio Times meets Ben Kingsley (published June 19, 2016)
"By 1841 imports of raw cotton had risen to 205 thousand tonnes and they would peak in 1914 at almost a billion tonnes. The character of Manchester changed. The cotton mills employed less in the city as the century wore on, by 1840 only 18% of the work force worked in cotton manufacture. Manchester became the commercial centre of the industry, its clearing house. The dominant building was the stately warehouse for the display of finished cotton goods or the ornate bank and office providing loans and credit for the production of cotton.
Above all Manchester was the town of the Royal Exchange, where thousands of traders would meet on Tuesdays and Fridays to do business. Production became concentrated in the outer towns, spinning nearby in Bolton, Oldham and Stockport, weaving in towns to the north such as Preston, Burnley, and Blackburn. The trade in cotton amounted to 50% of British exports in the 1830s, and stood at 80% of global cotton piece goods in the 1880s.
Reliance on a distant raw material made the trade vulnerable. The American Civil War showed this, when the supply from the Confederate States had been blockaded by the Union North. Sourcing raw cotton from India and Egypt and the growth of trade with the British Empire maintained the industry until after WWI. But business declined as production rose in countries close to the raw material and with cheaper labour or with more up-to-date methods. To shore up the industry, there was a rise in tariffs for cotton imports plus schemes to reduce excess production. It was too late, a reluctance to develop new business practices and to invest in new machines, e.g. move from spinning mules to ring spinners, cost the trade dear.
A great arc of the city centre from the south through the east and into the Northern Quarter and Ancoats is still defined by Cottonopolis."
Above all Manchester was the town of the Royal Exchange, where thousands of traders would meet on Tuesdays and Fridays to do business. Production became concentrated in the outer towns, spinning nearby in Bolton, Oldham and Stockport, weaving in towns to the north such as Preston, Burnley, and Blackburn. The trade in cotton amounted to 50% of British exports in the 1830s, and stood at 80% of global cotton piece goods in the 1880s.
Reliance on a distant raw material made the trade vulnerable. The American Civil War showed this, when the supply from the Confederate States had been blockaded by the Union North. Sourcing raw cotton from India and Egypt and the growth of trade with the British Empire maintained the industry until after WWI. But business declined as production rose in countries close to the raw material and with cheaper labour or with more up-to-date methods. To shore up the industry, there was a rise in tariffs for cotton imports plus schemes to reduce excess production. It was too late, a reluctance to develop new business practices and to invest in new machines, e.g. move from spinning mules to ring spinners, cost the trade dear.
A great arc of the city centre from the south through the east and into the Northern Quarter and Ancoats is still defined by Cottonopolis."
- Jonathan Schofield, Confidentials : Manchester
Cottonopolis
Wheatsheaf Colliery
Ben Kingsley in 'Gandhi'
Ben Kingsley
'Stop Right There' - The Hollies
Kingsley decided to devote himself almost exclusively to theatre work in the 1970s, though he did make his film debut in Michael Tuchner's thriller 'Fear Is The Key' (1972), earning the appreciation of the film's star Suzy Kendall. He auditioned for theatre director Trevor Nunn and became a part of the Royal Shakespeare Company, making his Broadway debut in 1971. Kingsley acted in productions staged by Peter Brook and Peter Hall, innovators in British theatre, and he read many of the classics, becoming particularly noted for his performances in the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Johnson and Anton Chekhov.
Kingsley's complex work with communist director Mary Ann 'Buzz' Goodbody included adaptations of Catholic playwright Trevor Griffiths' previously rejected examination of left-wing ideologies, 'Occupations', and a radical reworking of William Shakespeare's epic 'Hamlet', both of which were considered extremely controversial at the time (in more recent years, Nunn selected Kingsley's performance in 'Hamlet' as his favourite portrayal of the vengeful Prince). Goodbody was intent upon rewriting the rules of theatre, as her idol Joan Greenwood had done with signature performer Barbara Windsor in tow. Goodbody's company players included Charles Dance and Patrick Stewart (Kingsley's fellow Yorkshireman).
"In April 1975, a production of Hamlet opened at The Other Place, the Royal Shakespeare Company's pocket-sized studio theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. A little-known 31-year-old called Ben Kingsley was the prince. Elsewhere in the cast were Charles Dance and Mikel Lambert. The reviewers fell off their seats in shock. Nicholas de Jongh, writing for the Guardian, called the production "totally unexpected". The Times' Irving Wardle confessed: "It is a long time since I have been so gripped." He later ranked it one of his productions of the decade. In fact, played in jeans and shirt-sleeves to an audience of just 150, this Hamlet was proclaimed one of the greatest anyone could remember.
One person was not there to celebrate: the director, Buzz Goodbody. A few days before, she had taken a fatal overdose of sleeping pills in her London flat. She was just 28.
As well as being a tragedy for her family, friends and colleagues, Goodbody's death robbed theatre of one of its brightest lights. Not only was she the first female director at the RSC (perhaps the UK's first salaried female director), The Other Place was her brainchild: a converted tin hut that pioneered small-scale Shakespeare and demonstrated that the "fringe" could be every bit as thrilling as the mainstream. Goodbody may have only been in her 20s when she died, with just a handful of professional productions to her name, but we are still living with her legacy. So why have so few people heard of her?
"It's partly because she was so young and partly because of the manner of her death," says Erica Whyman, the RSC's deputy artistic director. "For all sorts of rational reasons, people haven't wanted to talk about it. And it's hard to get your head around the impact she made in such a short time."
By any standards, Goodbody broke the mould. Born in 1946, christened Mary Ann ("Buzz" was a childhood nickname) and raised in various well-heeled areas of London, she won a scholarship to the exclusive Roedean girls' school. It was there that she began to kick back: she joined the Communist party as a teenager and, when she went to Sussex university, ceremonially tossed her Roedean straw boater into the sea.
Theatre was the outlet for both her creativity and her politics: in the RSC's archives – in a heartbreakingly small number of boxes – are programmes for her 1967 student adaptation of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, and photographs of her participating in wildcat feminist street protests. In one, for reasons unclear, she brandishes a giant deodorant outside the National Gallery.
Goodbody caught the eye of John Barton, the RSC's co-founder, who employed her as his assistant and encouraged her in the rehearsal room (unheard of). She threw herself into Theatregoround, a "guerrilla" outfit made up of politically committed RSC types that toured schools. She assisted on main-stage productions and directed her own: a revolutionary 1970 revival of the gender-bending Elizabethan thriller Arden of Faversham; a bare-as-bones King John with Patrick Stewart the same year that emphasised the absurd futility of war.
Above all, Goodbody agitated for the RSC to build a small experimental theatre: a space where it could attract people unable or unwilling to pay for seats in the main house – and find new political purpose. In December 1973, she sent a memo to her boss, Trevor Nunn, arguing for a "studio/second auditorium" operating on a near-invisible budget, using RSC actors already on contract, and aimed at an audience of locals ("notoriously hostile to us"), factory workers from Coventry and Birmingham, and schoolchildren.
Whyman flicks through a copy of the memo: seven densely typewritten pages. "She really cares about who comes," says Whyman, who has been charged with relaunching The Other Place. "She wants them to have the very best experience, something that makes them excited about theatre in the ways that she's excited about theatre."
The following year, The Other Place opened, with Goodbody as founding artistic director. Tickets cost 70p with the audience squashed in on benches as best they could. Performers and spectators were eyeball to eyeball. It was asphyxiatingly hot. But it was exciting. "It wasn't The Other Place to us," remembers Charles Dance. "It was the main place."
One person was not there to celebrate: the director, Buzz Goodbody. A few days before, she had taken a fatal overdose of sleeping pills in her London flat. She was just 28.
As well as being a tragedy for her family, friends and colleagues, Goodbody's death robbed theatre of one of its brightest lights. Not only was she the first female director at the RSC (perhaps the UK's first salaried female director), The Other Place was her brainchild: a converted tin hut that pioneered small-scale Shakespeare and demonstrated that the "fringe" could be every bit as thrilling as the mainstream. Goodbody may have only been in her 20s when she died, with just a handful of professional productions to her name, but we are still living with her legacy. So why have so few people heard of her?
"It's partly because she was so young and partly because of the manner of her death," says Erica Whyman, the RSC's deputy artistic director. "For all sorts of rational reasons, people haven't wanted to talk about it. And it's hard to get your head around the impact she made in such a short time."
By any standards, Goodbody broke the mould. Born in 1946, christened Mary Ann ("Buzz" was a childhood nickname) and raised in various well-heeled areas of London, she won a scholarship to the exclusive Roedean girls' school. It was there that she began to kick back: she joined the Communist party as a teenager and, when she went to Sussex university, ceremonially tossed her Roedean straw boater into the sea.
Theatre was the outlet for both her creativity and her politics: in the RSC's archives – in a heartbreakingly small number of boxes – are programmes for her 1967 student adaptation of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, and photographs of her participating in wildcat feminist street protests. In one, for reasons unclear, she brandishes a giant deodorant outside the National Gallery.
Goodbody caught the eye of John Barton, the RSC's co-founder, who employed her as his assistant and encouraged her in the rehearsal room (unheard of). She threw herself into Theatregoround, a "guerrilla" outfit made up of politically committed RSC types that toured schools. She assisted on main-stage productions and directed her own: a revolutionary 1970 revival of the gender-bending Elizabethan thriller Arden of Faversham; a bare-as-bones King John with Patrick Stewart the same year that emphasised the absurd futility of war.
Above all, Goodbody agitated for the RSC to build a small experimental theatre: a space where it could attract people unable or unwilling to pay for seats in the main house – and find new political purpose. In December 1973, she sent a memo to her boss, Trevor Nunn, arguing for a "studio/second auditorium" operating on a near-invisible budget, using RSC actors already on contract, and aimed at an audience of locals ("notoriously hostile to us"), factory workers from Coventry and Birmingham, and schoolchildren.
Whyman flicks through a copy of the memo: seven densely typewritten pages. "She really cares about who comes," says Whyman, who has been charged with relaunching The Other Place. "She wants them to have the very best experience, something that makes them excited about theatre in the ways that she's excited about theatre."
The following year, The Other Place opened, with Goodbody as founding artistic director. Tickets cost 70p with the audience squashed in on benches as best they could. Performers and spectators were eyeball to eyeball. It was asphyxiatingly hot. But it was exciting. "It wasn't The Other Place to us," remembers Charles Dance. "It was the main place."
- Andrew Dickson, 'Buzz Goodbody : The Tin Hut Revolutionary'
Mikel Lambert & Ben Kingsley in 'Hamlet'
Alternate Medley by The Beatles
Kingsley also made his mark in television in the 1970s. He appeared in Mike Leigh's 'Play For Today' entry 'Hard Labour' (1973), Ken Loach's Chekhov adaptation 'A Misfortune' (1973) and Jack Gold's 'Playhouse' entry 'Thank You, Comrades' (1978). He portrayed artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 'The Love School' and took on occasional, small roles in television series.
"Sir Ben Kingsley is an enigma both on and off screen and is well known as a very private person. I first interviewed the multi-award-winning actor when he played Faustus at the Royal Exchange Theatre immediately after winning an Oscar for his screen role as Gandhi in Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1982 award-winning film.
“The stage was always my first love,” Ben told me then. “It’s the reason I became an actor. But after all the Hollywood glitter I felt I needed to be grounded again back home where I belong.”
Born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in Yorkshire, he was brought up in Pendlebury and was a student at Manchester Grammar School, where actor Robert Powell was in the same class. He went on to study at Pendlebury College, which now houses the Ben Kingsley Theatre and Salford University where he studied for a science degree.
“My father was a doctor and it was presumed that I would follow in his footsteps,” Ben explains.
“My mother had been an actress but they thought it ridiculous that I become an actor and I had absolutely no support from them at all. I really brought myself up and I was a rather lonely little boy.”
Ben’s surprising candour continues as he reveals he found a substitute family in Salford Players, run then by John and Renee Caine.
“They were totally loving and supportive and became my family. Thanks to Salford Players, where I stayed a year and learnt my craft, I got my first job in professional theatre working in theatre-in-round so when eventually I came to the Exchange I felt quite comfortable.”
During the early stages of his career in 1966, Ben appeared as Ron Jenkins in two episodes of Coronation Street as well as in Crown Court. “That was good training because you learnt to think on your feet,” he says.
The following year he made his West End debut in A Smashing Day Out and successfully auditioned for the RSC."
“The stage was always my first love,” Ben told me then. “It’s the reason I became an actor. But after all the Hollywood glitter I felt I needed to be grounded again back home where I belong.”
Born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in Yorkshire, he was brought up in Pendlebury and was a student at Manchester Grammar School, where actor Robert Powell was in the same class. He went on to study at Pendlebury College, which now houses the Ben Kingsley Theatre and Salford University where he studied for a science degree.
“My father was a doctor and it was presumed that I would follow in his footsteps,” Ben explains.
“My mother had been an actress but they thought it ridiculous that I become an actor and I had absolutely no support from them at all. I really brought myself up and I was a rather lonely little boy.”
Ben’s surprising candour continues as he reveals he found a substitute family in Salford Players, run then by John and Renee Caine.
“They were totally loving and supportive and became my family. Thanks to Salford Players, where I stayed a year and learnt my craft, I got my first job in professional theatre working in theatre-in-round so when eventually I came to the Exchange I felt quite comfortable.”
During the early stages of his career in 1966, Ben appeared as Ron Jenkins in two episodes of Coronation Street as well as in Crown Court. “That was good training because you learnt to think on your feet,” he says.
The following year he made his West End debut in A Smashing Day Out and successfully auditioned for the RSC."
- Natalie Anglesey, Manchester Evening News
"Coronation Street takes place in Salford and I was brought up five miles from there - it's very much in my background and my territory. So to be part of such an iconic series early on in my career was wonderful. We had great writers and extraordinary directors. It was like live theatre: we ran from one part of the studio to the other to keep the tapes rolling. Quite marvellous."
- Ben Kingsley, The Telegraph
- Ben Kingsley, The Telegraph
Robert Redford & Ben Kingsley
'Maker' - The Hollies
In the 1980s, Kingsley was cast by filmmaker Richard Attenborough to play Mahatma Gandhi in the political biopic 'Gandhi' (1982), for which he received an Academy Award for Best Actor. Though somewhat tentative at first, Kingsley eventually embraced the cinematic medium and is now a regular performer in movies.
"Perhaps this is one of the perks of knighthood: Before Sir Ben Kingsley even enters the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, there's a table in the corner waiting for him, with two pots of tea and a basket of pastries. When he sits down, though, there's nothing terribly stuffy or regal about the Oscar-winning actor who plays silent film pioneer Georges Melies in Martin Scorsese's "Hugo." Rather, Kingsley is affable, articulate and eager to talk about acting, storytelling and the director who, he says, sees everything on a movie set.
"Hugo" has proven to be a tricky sell commercially, and it's unlikely to be a moneymaker – but the film is a marvelous and magical journey that fully justifies Scorsese's decision to adapt Brian Selznick's book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," and to shoot it in 3D. And Kingsley is sly, sad and commanding as a man desperate to bury his glorious past.
"Hugo" has proven to be a tricky sell commercially, and it's unlikely to be a moneymaker – but the film is a marvelous and magical journey that fully justifies Scorsese's decision to adapt Brian Selznick's book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," and to shoot it in 3D. And Kingsley is sly, sad and commanding as a man desperate to bury his glorious past.
- "Were you familiar with the book, or with Georges Melies' work?"
- "Neither. Neither the book nor Georges' work. My starting point was the script by John Logan, which was a wonderful read. The arc of everyone's character is so extraordinary it jumps off the page. And also, I loved to see that Georges would be filmed by Marty at the height of his powers, in his glass palace where he was a king with so many domains: writer, director, designer, set decorator, editor, leading man, magician, special effects creator … Probably because he didn’t know what the limits were, he was breaking boundaries all the time. Because he was the first of the great auteurs, nobody told him, "Georges, you can't do that, "as I'm afraid they would today. He just had no boundaries whatsoever. I watch those early films of his, and his joie de vivre was completely contagious. It must have affected his audiences."
- "Neither. Neither the book nor Georges' work. My starting point was the script by John Logan, which was a wonderful read. The arc of everyone's character is so extraordinary it jumps off the page. And also, I loved to see that Georges would be filmed by Marty at the height of his powers, in his glass palace where he was a king with so many domains: writer, director, designer, set decorator, editor, leading man, magician, special effects creator … Probably because he didn’t know what the limits were, he was breaking boundaries all the time. Because he was the first of the great auteurs, nobody told him, "Georges, you can't do that, "as I'm afraid they would today. He just had no boundaries whatsoever. I watch those early films of his, and his joie de vivre was completely contagious. It must have affected his audiences."
- Steve Pond, Reuters
The Hollies perform a medley at the BBC
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Literary Origins
'Every Christian Lion Hearted Man Will Show You' - Bee Gees
Jeremy Irons & Ben Kingsley in David Jones' 'Betrayal' (1983), based on a play by Harold Pinter
Ben Kingsley in Giles Foster's 'Silas Marner : The Weaver Of Raveloe' (1985), an adaptation of a story by George Eliot
Ben Kingsley & Harold Pinter in John Irvin's 'Turtle Diary' (1985), inspired by a novel by Russell Hoban
Ben Kingsley in James Ivory's 'Maurice' (1987), an adaptation of a novel by E.M. Forster
Charles Dance & Ben Kingsley in James Dearden's 'Pascali's Island' (1988), an adaptation of a novel by Barry Unsworth
Michael Caine & Ben Kingsley in Thom Eberhardt's 'Without A Clue' (1988), based upon the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle
Liam Neeson & Ben Kingsley in Steven Spielberg's 'Schindler's List' (1993), inspired by a book by Thomas Keneally
Ben Kingsley & Sigourney Weaver in Roman Polanski's 'Death And The Maiden' (1994), based upon a play by Ariel Dorfman
Jennifer Connelly & Ben Kingsley in Vadim Perelman's 'House Of Sand And Fog' (2003), based on a novel by Andre Dubus III
Ben Kingsley & Dennis Hopper in Isabel Coixet's 'Elegy' (2008), an adaptation of a novel by Philip Roth
Ben Kingsley, Leonardo DiCaprio & Mark Ruffalo in Martin Scorsese's 'Shutter Island' (2010), an adaptation of a novel by Dennis Lehane
Jim Sturgess & Ben Kingsley in Brad Anderson's 'Stonehearst Asylum' (2014), based upon a story by Edgar Allan Poe
Anthony Hopkins & Ben Kingsley
'Indian Gin & Whiskey Dry' - Bee Gees
