I am in a room with Sir Ben Kingsley and a herd of elephants. We are talking,
in the somewhat lofty, nonsensical style that an encounter with Sir Ben
dictates, and pretending not to notice the elephants. It’s not easy. They
are blaring away like anything. These are metaphorical elephants, obviously.
Sir Ben and I have met to discuss Elegy, his new film based on a short
story by Philip Roth called The Dying Animal. “My two younger sons,”
he says, “one is an acting student and one is an actor. We watched a bit of Elegy
on DVD – only a little, because we were going somewhere and had to leave the
house, but they both said, ‘Dad, it’s you.’ Which was great. I wanted to
throw away the disguise.”
The awkward elephants shuffle their feet. As any reader of the gossip columns
will tell you, he was married last year to Daniela Barbosa de Carneiro, a
stunning, raven-haired, South American beauty who, at 34, is almost 30 years
his junior. She is just next door, protected by publicists and perhaps
preferring not to step through into our little room to hear her new husband
discuss this film.
In it he plays an ageing peripatetic writer, David Kepesh, who is struggling
in a tortured, paranoid relationship with a much younger woman – a stunning,
raven-haired, South American beauty, in fact. Played by Penélope Cruz. Who
is 34.
On screen, you can sometimes see the actor blush, a rosy red glow suffusing
his entire naked scalp. Not entirely innocently, I inquire how this is done.
“I met Penélope before the shoot,” says Sir Ben, as though sharing a secret.
“Dani and I met her. Adorable woman. And I said to Penélope . . . I said to
Dani . . . I’ll ask Penélope about . . . this . . .”
“This” is his face, the perfect shaved head and the neat goatee beard. In Elegy
he looks almost the same, except that the beard is an unabashed silver-grey.
Today it is dyed black, although not very well.
“So I said, ‘Penélope’,” he continues, “ ‘what do you think about the shaved
head and the beard? Can I use that?’ And she said, ‘Perfecto!’.” Then he
asked the director if he could be English rather than Roth’s American. Then
he went to the costume department and chose clothes similar to his own. “The
closer I get to myself,” he says, “the less is my disguise. I was
engineering . . . the possibility of me . . . blushing.”
Kingsley doesn’t talk; he declares. There are great pauses in his
conversation, during which mountains grow and oceans move. Sometimes he will
stare into your eyes, like a mad prophet. Sometimes he addresses the middle
distance. Arms will fly out, quite shockingly, but even the merest
finger-twitch demands your attention. This is the problem with interviewing
Sir Ben Kingsley. All this from a single question; a quarter of my tape. And
among it all, really, no sort of answer.
He is a busy man, Sir Ben. Five or six films a year, every year. In 2008,
aside from Elegy, there is The Love Guru, The Wackness, War Inc,
Noah’s Ark and Transiberian. As we speak, he has just
returned from Boston, where he was filming Martin Scorsese’s Shutter
Island. Does he worry that he might be making too many films? Does he
find it hard to relax when he stops? “I have a friend who paints,” he says,
softly. “He lives in LA, he’s an Irishman called Patrick Morrison. And to
see him paint . . . he is in a state of . . . grace.”
This, instead of “yes” or “no”. He claims to enjoy the process of interview.
For the journalist he is hard work. Questions are reformulated with a
politician’s skill, and he turns them into the ones he wants to answer. His
primary concern, he says, is how his words may be read by young actors. “I
am always aware,” he declaims, “that they are listening.”
Kingsley is very conscious of his achievements, and seems keen for others to
be conscious of them, too. There was the “Sir Ben” fandango of last year, in
which he reportedly insisted that the posters for Lucky Number Slevin
used his title. He is about to accept his third honorary degree, this time
from Sussex University, where his mentor Lord Attenborough is about to stand
down as Chancellor.
Ben Kingsley didn’t go to university. His relationship with academia, he says,
“was a bit of a mess-up”. When he was 18 he was called Krishna Bhanji. His
father was an Indian doctor from Kenya and his mother was a model and
bit-part actress. “Very glamorous,” he says. “Who would her role model be?
Greta Garbo.” They met at a student dance at Guy’s Hospital, and bequeathed
him, he says “decent genetics”. In the many nude scenes in Elegy,
certainly, he looks in pretty good shape for a man coming up to his pension.
A male Helen Mirren, perhaps? He laughs.
With mediocre A levels, Bhanji decided that it would be “a pretty bad idea” to
try for medical school. “I watched Ian Holm play Richard III at
Stratford-upon-Avon,” he says, “and I fainted during the performance. When I
was revived, I felt . . . I’ve got to do this. Got to.” There followed, he
says, “an odd wilderness in Salford, where I earned money as a research
chemist for ICI. It was very menial. I think I washed the test tubes. But
then, in the evenings, I joined the Salford Players amateur dramatic society
. . .”
Trekking down to London he changed his name and was rejected by RADA (“My son
went there,” he says, quickly. “My other son went to Guildhall”), but within
the three years he would otherwise have spent studying he had joined the
Royal Shakespeare Company and played a role in Coronation Street.
“Ron Jenkins,” he says, doing the voice. “He were a lad.” That’s the stuff.
In character, even for a sentence of Mancunian from a soap.
His Oscar-winning role in Gandhi came about after Richard
Attenborough’s son Michael saw him play Hamlet for the RSC. “My father was
Gujarati, like Gandhiji, but Dickie had no idea. To him I was just a
Manchester Grammar boy from the RSC. I had to secretly lose a lot of weight,
I watched some footage, read a book and then I was filming.” Attenborough,
he says, is the “inspiring man of that film, even more than Gandhi himself.
What I learnt from him is still paying off. Like something that is
radioactive, which has a long life.”
It is Gandhi that they will put on his gravestone, but tell somebody you are
meeting Ben Kingsley and it is his terrifying Oscar-nominated gangster in Sexy
Beast that always comes up. It seems almost inconceivable that one man
could play both roles. On screen, when he wills it, Kingsley is simply
somebody else.
This is what makes his performance in Elegy so baffling, because, in
that one, he really, really isn’t. Hence all these elephants. Kingsley
himself describes his character as a man who “maintains his isolated state
by a series of affairs”.
For the person depicted in the gossip columns to have taken that role is
extraordinary. “Well, I don’t read them,” says Sir Ben, donning his pith
helmet and flaring his eyes. “I have no interest in them at all.”
What does he think they might say? “I haven’t the faintest idea what they
say.”
But I do. And much of his audience will, too. They say that he is a man on his
fourth marriage, and his second to somebody significantly his junior. And
there he is on screen, looking like Ben Kingsley and sounding like Ben
Kingsley and worrying about an age gap. There is even a scene where he looks
out on to a crowded street and tortures himself by imagining his
much-younger lover to be committing a public act of infidelity. And this,
from a man who reportedly left his youthful third wife – the German
socialite Alexandra Christmann – after a newspaper printed a photograph of
her with another man. Close to the bone? It splinters the bone. He is exploiting
his audience’s preconceptions, and denying it.
“But I’m not, though,” he says, leaning in with his face dangerously close. “I
don’t know their preconceptions at all. I have . . . to . . . plead . . .
ignorance.”
Oh hell, maybe he is telling the truth. Maybe he doesn’t know what people will
think, or doesn’t care. At times, indeed, you feel that Isabel Coixet, the
director of Elegy, may even be exploiting that; that the viewer ends
up more aware of what is going on than the character, or the actor, or even
Philip Roth. Elegy is a beautiful film, but it is also a conspiracy
of self-justification for the older man with a younger woman. Relax, it
says. All the age-related doubts will be your own. Nobody else will care,
least of all her. She is willing, adoring, and pliant.
“A-wooo,” go the elephants. Stomp, trumpet, stomp.
Elegy is released on Aug 8 2008
