With his turn as Fagin in Roman Polanski’s new adaptation of
Oliver Twist, Ben Kingsley offers — and not the for the frst time — another show-stealing performance. At once threatening and menacing, Kingsley’s Fagin, who provides the dark core of Polanski’s film, already ranks alongside Anthony Hopkins’s
Hannibal Lecter and Jack Nicholson’s
Colonel Nathan R. Jessep in A Few Good Men, as one of modern cinema’s most compelling tortured souls.
In the process, Kingsley may finally have shaken off the clogging saintly nimbus of playing Gandhi in 1982. It sounds like nonsense because at first glance he has never struggled with typecasting. Even though his Oscar-winning performance as Gandhi was definitive and career-shaping, he sailed on to play a determinedly varied gallery of characters: weaklings, nutters, saintly accountants, suicidal patriarchs.
Oliver Twist, though, is interesting because Fagin is the first overtly craven role that Kingsley has played. He is bent over, a stooped pantomime of hand-wringing deference, which is a world away from his 20-year chain of rigidly upright characters. Polanski’s film would be all the poorer without him; in fact, it is hard to imagine anyone else now performing the role of Fagin.
Kingsley based his Fagin on a junk-shop owner he encountered as a child, growing up in Manchester, and he has been true to the child’s perspective, keeping it larger than life. It is a softer Fagin than the traditional, somewhat hateful caricature. Buried under his layers of shabby overcoat, his Fagin has a wounded soul. The difference this time, is the inevitable shreds of dignity are discovered gradually, rather than presented all of a piece upfront.
For most of his career, though, Kinglsey has battled against type. While he has done sci-fi trash, Harold Pinter scripts, a George Eliot adaptation and even a buffoonish version Sherlock Holmes, Without a Clue, he has continued to occupy the moral centre in many of his films.
It first began when his career opened up in Hollywood in the Nineties. He was the ever watchful sidekick, the voice of reason, the cautious advisor. As the accountant Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List; as the proud Iranian immigrant in House of Sand and Fog; and as the washed up chess player in Searching for Bobby Fischer.
That air of sparsely pious rectitude can be traced back to the man who drove the British from India armed only with only aphorisms and a loincloth. After Gandhi, Kingsley didn’t try to outrun the long shadow of the part — he took it with him. Even in his most throwaway roles and cartoonish surroundings he has an epic gravity of purpose.
One director who worked with him in the Eighties joked — half-joked — that Kingsley had taken Gandhi so seriously that he thought he was Gandhi. The last time this happened was when Edward Fox forgot to stop playing the Duke of Windsor after Edward and Mrs Simpson.
This unwavering high-mindedness and sense of propriety have the makings of a truly great comic style, if moved to the right setting, rather like Leslie Nielsen’s serenely oblivious detective in the Naked Gun films. It is perfect that Patrick Stewart, another tongue-rolling, chrome-headed thespian in the same grandioso school, was a Royal Shakespeare Company cohort of Kingsley’s.
Most of the casting agents I spoke to about it, simply marvelled at “Sir Ben’s” versatility. He’s English so he’s classy, even when he’s in DOA fare such as Thunderbirds and A Sound of Thunder. But one of the town’s more sophisticated producers, who had worked with Kingsley, acknowledged the difficulty of tampering with such self-possession.
“He’s a serious artist. He’s studied Shakespeare. So you think: If it’s not bad, why take it on? He is a pro. He always came prepared. So you let him do what he does, only to realise later that it’s same steady, underplayed style you’d seen him do elsewhere.” Of course, such sedulously cultivated dignity is easy to twit. Any actor worth his salt is going to get swept up in a grand role. And Kingsley has played some grand ones: Moses, Stalin, Lenin. Then since 2001 he has had the plum role of real-life knight of the realm. Unlike Sir Anthony Hopkins, who squirms lavishly at the use of his title, Kingsley accepts the use of his title as nothing less than his due, even on set, where the Americans, amusingly, are the most eager to observe the “Sir Ben” protocol.
It hasn’t really changed his acting, though. He always performed with the conscientious air of someone at a Royal Command Performance. But no one can accuse him of being a florid ham. Except perhaps when he first realised he wanted to act after seeing Ian Holm playing the Duke of Gloucester. A swooning 16-year-old Kingsley had to be ferried outside and resuscitated by his parents, whereupon he pointed at the theatre and gasped, “That’s what I want to be.”
Over the next four decades, he moved from Royal Shakespeare Company apprentice, to television journeyman to consummate dramatic screen actor. He has winnowed away the overscaled flourishes, fashioning a staunchly minimalist style. “I’m not an actor who psyches himself up for a take. I do the opposite. I actually try and reduce, and get to what I call a flat line or a zero.” It is on the camera, and no longer the stage, where he takes full advantage of his compressed physique — still taut at 61 — and patient eagle features.
The role that first saw Kingsley move away from the moral high ground was that of the psychotic gangster Don Logan in Sexy Beast (2000). “I wanted him contained like a coiled spring,” said the director, Jonathan Glazer. The bald head was now a bullet matched with a flick-knife body, and a torrent of theatrical Cockney dialogue. “Oh I loved the part, loved it,” admitted Kingsley.
The part brought out a hidden flair for menacing showmanship. And Kingsley finally overthrew the often deadening air of dignity that he brings to every part.
Of all his films, Kingsley cites as his three favourites, Gandhi, Schindler’s List and House of Sand and Fog. Two martyrs and a saint. In the latter, he played a Persian ex-army officer who has so much dignity that he commits suicide. He literally suffocates himself with his exorbitant pride, dressed in his army uniform, throttled in a plastic bag. With Oliver Twist, though, he has finally managed to find a breach. The patient eagle is flying higher than ever.
