Ben Kingsley

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:29

Our Castaway Today is by common consent one of Britain's finest and most versatile of actors. And more than that, he's a star of international reputation because of his portrayal of Gandhi in Richard Attenborough's film, a performance which gained him the Academy Award for Best Actor. He is Ben Kingsley.

Presenter0:46

Ben, I didn't realize until I started reading about you that in fact you're a Yorkshireman.

Ben Kingsley0:51

I am indeed. I was born in Snainton, which is near Scarborough. My father had a well, he didn't have his own practice as a doctor then. He was a junior assistant to a country doctor out in the Snainton area, and I lived there for the first two years of my life, and then of course did the dreadful act of

Ben Kingsley1:10

Crossing the Pennines.

Presenter1:11

You went to live in Lancashire.

Ben Kingsley1:12

and I went to live in Lancashire.

Presenter1:12

Uh

Presenter1:14

Ben Kingsley wasn't your name in those days, was it?

Ben Kingsley1:16

No, it wasn't. It was by my father's counsel that I changed my name. I it was very fashionable at that time for actors in Manchester to find stage names for themselves. And I used to drink with all the um Granada television chaps in a pub in Manchester, and I was very struck by them and their lifestyle, and they advised me to change my name as well.

Ben Kingsley1:39

I opted for Ben Kingsley because of my father's nickname, which was Ben.

Ben Kingsley1:44

and Kingsley, which has connections with my grandfather's nickname on my father's side. And it's stuck and it's now legally my name. What was your real name? My mother gave me my forename, Krishna.

Presenter1:54

What was your real name?

Ben Kingsley1:59

And my father's family name was Banji.

Ben Kingsley2:04

I believe that's a Moslem name. But my father's family changed its name, I think, four times in the last century. It's sort of a naturally pragmatic thing for people there to do. I didn't realize this. I thought that there was a great sort of patriarchal and filial loyalty to the name, but apparently this is nonsense.

Ben Kingsley2:25

My dad, being the great pragmatist that he was, said, Well, it's your turn now. I mean, for your generation, you have your own, so um.

Ben Kingsley2:33

It was with some relief that uh he counselled me in that way, because it it was a little bit upsetting, but um

Ben Kingsley2:40

At the time, he guided me through it.

Presenter2:44

What about music in those early days? Was there much music in the house? Were you interested in music at all?

Ben Kingsley2:49

There was a tremendous amount of music in the house. My mother was a fashion model in her young days, and also she

Ben Kingsley2:59

played small roles in films, many films, over twenty films, mostly with the Corder brothers. She was therefore very into um the contemporary music of the time. And I was born in nineteen forty three, so it was big band stuff then.

Ben Kingsley3:15

My father, who was born in East Africa, had brought over with him as a student lots of Indian seventy eights some classical, some film music, um some Gujarati, some Hindi. So I was brought up on a diet of big bands and um sitars and tablos extraordinary mixture and I can still see the light pouring through this Manchester suburb sitting room window.

Speaker 13:34

Exhausting.

Ben Kingsley3:45

In a very sort of rather Victorian English drawing-room.

Ben Kingsley3:50

and out of this whopping great mahogany record player, the most bizarre Indian music rolling across the Axminster carpet. And for me there was nothing incongruous in this at all. There was a harmony in that room that has stayed with me, and I always find

Ben Kingsley4:08

Any disharmony in certain areas, rather incomprehensible. I don't mean that in a lazy way.

Ben Kingsley4:14

But when I read of or witness appalling racial disharmony, I I go back to that sitting room and I think this is nonsense. This disharmony is absolute nonsense. But of course it was a very protected middle class upbringing. I haven't had to go through many of the horrors that I know other children at that time were going through.

Presenter4:32

Well, Ben, let's take a choice of music now, first choice of music. You've chosen, in fact, a very British piece of music, haven't you?

Ben Kingsley4:38

Yes, I have. I've chosen Vaughan Williams, his variations on a theme by Thomas Tallis. It reminds me of my visits to the Halley Orchestra in Manchester, and Barbara Rolley was our star, and I used to go with my mum to hear him perform.

Presenter5:57

What decided you to

Ben Kingsley6:00

Make a career as an actor.

Presenter6:01

Uh

Ben Kingsley6:01

It was fairly late on, I think I was nineteen, when I voiced a conscious decision.

Ben Kingsley6:07

When I was at school.

Ben Kingsley6:09

Manchester Grammar School had a dramatic society.

Ben Kingsley6:12

and my contemporary, Bob Powell, we were in the first form together.

Ben Kingsley6:18

and I both joined um the Dramatic Society.

Ben Kingsley6:22

He rocketed to stardom, and I withdrew.

Ben Kingsley6:25

And by by the second year I pursued my physics, my chemistry, my biology, my zoology.

Ben Kingsley6:32

To become a doctor, like my brother, like my father.

Ben Kingsley6:35

I think that was an emotional decision for me, Madsen.

Ben Kingsley6:39

I loved the role. I was hooked on Doctor Kildare at the time. He he sort of drifted from patient to patient and and cured them with his smile and his gentle touch and his eyes. And I thought uh that would be a good part for me in life.

Presenter6:54

But even that was acting, wasn't it?

Ben Kingsley6:55

It was a fantasy. It was a fantasy.

Presenter6:58

So wasn't there one moment which changed your mind, which took you away?

Ben Kingsley7:00

Well, there was. I was fortunate enough to go to um Stratford-on-Avon when I was nineteen on holiday.

Ben Kingsley7:07

And I couldn't get a ticket to sit in the auditorium at Stratford. I had to buy a standing ticket. I think it was five shillings at the time.

Ben Kingsley7:16

And I stood and watched Ian Holme.

Ben Kingsley7:20

Play an astonishingly dangerous Richard the Third.

Ben Kingsley7:25

And as he began to walk to and fro across the stage, I began to walk to and fro across the back of the auditorium to try and keep a minimum distance between the performance and myself.

Ben Kingsley7:37

I remember passing out with the heat and the excitement, and was revived in the foyer by an usherette, who, having administered a glass of water, ushered me back into the theatre. And when the play concluded I left through the doors into the afternoon sunlight, and my mum and dad were waiting to meet me. And I remember saying to my dad, my great pragmatist father

Ben Kingsley8:03

His aspiring medical student son said, This is where I want to be, this is what I want to do. And he said, Fine, all right. He then introduced me to the Salford Players Dramatic Society, and uh I rocketed to Stardom within the Society. They promoted me swiftly and lovingly to some wonderful roles. And having played The Golden Boy in Clifford Adett's play about the boxer, one of the chaps in the society said, You must audition, either for a drama school or for a repertory company. You must at least give yourself the chance. Make it a part of your history that at least you tried.

Ben Kingsley8:48

So I did. But it was that afternoon Wythe and Holme that suddenly rocketed all the molecules that were there, dormant, to the surface.

Presenter8:56

Let's take a second choice of record now, uh then?

Ben Kingsley8:59

My second choice is Phil Collins. I have listened to this man for many years, and if I were to take a piece of contemporary English poetry with me and music, I would treasure him. He's a wonderful voice and a great writer.

Speaker 29:15

Well now simply try nothing.

Speaker 29:19

Things to say

Speaker 29:23

Somewhere lies beneath the fit somewhere.

Speaker 29:31

So it would seem we still got a long, long way to go.

Speaker 29:40

I've seen all I wanna see today.

Presenter9:46

Phil Collins

Presenter9:47

Ben Kingsley, you went to Radha and were turned down by Rada, which I think is rather amusing. But how therefore did you learn how to be an actor?

Ben Kingsley9:55

Well, after my audition for Rada.

Ben Kingsley10:00

You see, I was so arrogant. I I think that I auditioned in such an arrogant fashion that they thought, Well, he needs two years here, like a hole in the head. Well, that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. I then auditioned for uh three repertory companies, Stoke on Trent, Huddersfield, and York, and they all accepted me straight away. So within a week of my non-acceptance at Rada, I was accepted by Peter Cheeseman at Stoke. Well, in fact, prior to Peter, I did three months with Brian Way, Children's Theatre, Theatre in Education. That was what happened after Rada. And then after Brian, I was able to go to Peter Cheeseman in the potteries. And we did documentaries and classics and Shakespeare and modern plays by Alan Plato, Peter Terson. Very, very exciting twelve months for me. I learnt a great deal. And in the round where there's no hiding place, where there's no time or need even for tricks, the actor becomes bonded to the audience in a very special way. And I'm very grateful that that was my first experience and not a Brisenia march behind which one can hide and the audience a a sort of black hole'cause the lights are blinding you anyway.

Presenter11:13

Let's have another piece of music.

Ben Kingsley11:15

Well, this is where I I became aware of history and some of history's horrendous chapters when I was seventeen. I remember listening for the first time to Benjamin Britton's War Requiem. I listened to it because my brother, a collector of books at the time, brought back into the house a massive collection of photographs from the First World War, which ironically was published in nineteen thirty three, the year that Hitler came to power. And I was so shocked by the book. Death and decay, the rats and the mud seeped off the pages of the book. And when I listened to the piece of music, the r reality of war, as opposed to the comic strip glamour of war, that alas was my diet at the time, impressed itself greatly upon my consciousness.

Presenter13:11

Ben Kingsley, you've done just about everything in acting. I mean, you've done a lot from the great classic roles to Coronation Street even. I didn't realise you'd been in Coronation Street. What were you doing in that part of the world?

Ben Kingsley13:21

I immortalized the role of Ron Jenkins.

Ben Kingsley13:25

a Casanova, a Don Juan of the Osaldo circuits, the old cinema circuits of the north. And he lurked behind Irma Barlow, Sandra Gough, and flirted with her and succeeded in dating her. And she was of course a happily married Coronation Street dweller. And the letters I received ranged from shock to deep admiration at my exploits as Ron Jenkins. He lasted three episodes, which isn't bad. Did you enjoy that? I did. It was a totally adrenalized experience because it was pretty well live television. The scripts were, and still are, extremely good. It was its young days. All the best Granada directors sharpened their teeth on Coronation Street and the writers, directors and producers around that jewel in the crown of Granada were great company to keep for me at that time. Next record, please. Next record is for and about my son Edmund.

Ben Kingsley14:27

It's everything that I think his childhood is at the moment, having built him a snowman in the garden this year. It's Walking in the Air by Alec Jones. It's from the cartoon The Snowman.

Speaker 214:43

We're walking in the air, We're floating in the moonlit sky

Speaker 214:56

People farming all are sleeping as before.

Presenter15:04

It's sad to think, isn't it, that that wonderful voice will disappear in the natural order of things.

Ben Kingsley15:07

In the natural order of things.

Presenter15:10

Absolutely this. Let's talk now a little bit about the one part that actually did change your life, because for seventeen years you were building a very steady reputation, Royal Shakespeare Company National Theatre. You had all the the respect and acclaim of the critics. Then all of a sudden Gandhi happened and that became an entirely different ballgame, didn't it?

Ben Kingsley15:10

Absolutely.

Ben Kingsley15:15

Got this.

Ben Kingsley15:27

Yes, it did. I think that the scale the actual scale of the film was a revelation to me.

Ben Kingsley15:34

Before if I were playing a leading role at the National or the R S C, it was my integrity as a fellow player that that got us through that that event, that evening, if you like.

Ben Kingsley15:45

But when I arrived in India and was greeted by Attenborough,

Ben Kingsley15:49

and I walked onto the set with him.

Ben Kingsley15:52

I realized that it was much closer to a field marshal and his top general. That Dickie and I shared a colossal responsibility. We travelled a million miles. I think there are a million people on the screen.

Ben Kingsley16:06

I must have looked at a million photographs of the man. We had a huge responsibility not only to the man and his philosophy, but to the country, to his living relatives, to the story.

Ben Kingsley16:19

It was that that I had not really experienced before, having dealt a great deal with fiction and fiction bound within the confines of a rehearsal room or a theatre.

Ben Kingsley16:29

I got onto the plateau of India and found that I was being watched while the cameras were turning by about twenty thousand people who'd just come with their lunch, you know, their tin boxes of rice and and vegetable curry and a few goats and children and flies being idly brushed away from the face. They would stand for hours and watch me recreating the father of their nation. All this focused on me a terrific amount of responsibility, and I hope I responded to it by compressing and concentrating my own integrity.

Ben Kingsley17:04

and emerging perhaps a bit like a diamond, you know, under pressure some of the muck gets blown off and and the essence remains, hopefully.

Ben Kingsley17:14

Yeah.

Presenter17:14

Is there one key to a character, is there one physical perhaps or psychological thing you have to understand to get right before you can get a character?

Ben Kingsley17:22

I think there is. It it it ambushes you. I think that's the marvellous thing about rehearsing or creating a role either on stage or in front of a camera.

Ben Kingsley17:31

That you suddenly find, if the world around you goes still enough, or goes noisy enough even, that you'll perhaps lift a glass of beer to your lips and think, My God, that's him, that's it, I've got it And it catalyzes everything else. It could be as simple as that. I remember with Gandhi, it was oddly enough, it was the way I listened. I realized that it was not the way he spoke, but it was the way he listened to others while they were speaking. That was my clue. I'd got it wrong. I'd thought, because he was such a great poet and orator and scribe.

Ben Kingsley18:06

that it obviously would be how he mobilized his language that would give me the clue. On the contrary, it was how he listened, and then, of course, I was told by his friends and advisers, the ancient ones who remembered him

Ben Kingsley18:18

Boy, they said, the way he sat and listened to the poorest of peasants was really something, and I I thought, well, good, I mean, something must have seeped through.

Presenter18:26

No doubt of course what the next choice of music's going to be.

Ben Kingsley18:29

No doubt at all. It it's the hymn to Gandhi that we used on our film, and it's a Ravishanka George Fenton Corporation.

Speaker 218:39

Sika Ram Jay, Si Kaaram

Speaker 218:47

Light of Yay!

Speaker 218:51

See the

Speaker 218:55

The world is the same.

Presenter19:09

Ben, I suppose that after the Academy Award for Best Actor, which you won for Gandhi, that you were offered just about everything, weren't you? What kind of range of parts were you offered?

Ben Kingsley19:19

Well, it was an enormous range. I was rather gratified to see how wide the range was. I guess it's because.

Ben Kingsley19:26

That little thin man in his dhoti with his cane walking stick is so unique that there is not a Gandhi type. He's one of history's and nature's one offs. So fortunately I wasn't offered a stream of little thin brown men in dhotis,'cause there ain't many, there's only one.

Ben Kingsley19:44

I was offered a lot of um heavy historical characters, Stalin.

Ben Kingsley19:51

Glennon.

Ben Kingsley19:52

And uh also chaplain?

Ben Kingsley19:54

Picasso was also mentioned indeed I read some material on the life of Picasso. But again it swung into strange, erotic fantasies, and some very violent films, and, as I say, an enormous range. But they were coming in.

Ben Kingsley20:09

At the rate of one a day, that is to say in the first year after the Oscar, I had read three hundred film scripts.

Ben Kingsley20:16

which is an awful lot. And some of them were made. I mean, it's not that w I was reading nonsense. There are films during that period that I declined to do that have been made very successfully.

Presenter20:25

But you turned them down and went to the theatre voice?

Ben Kingsley20:28

I was sent this script by a man called Raymond Fitzsimons.

Ben Kingsley20:33

And he made himself very vulnerable by saying, Mr. Kingsley, this is written for you. I saw your work a few years ago, and you are my Keene. You are my Edmund Keane. Now, like your predecessor, Roy Plumley, Raymond was a keen fanatic. Roy, I gather, had a lock of Edmund Keane's hair.

Ben Kingsley20:55

Now I read this play. I was looking for the other characters, and of course I realized there was only one character in it. It's Keen, arrogantly and pitiably holding forth in his dressing room and recounting his glories as an actor.

Ben Kingsley21:10

The link is that where Gandhi propelled me to great fame,

Ben Kingsley21:17

Keynes' Richard the Third and Othello, perhaps more importantly, Shylock too, compelled him to great fame, he became a Drury Lane star. He was mobbed.

Ben Kingsley21:28

He was a pop star, a Shakespeare pop star.

Ben Kingsley21:32

He died at the age of forty four of um alcoholism and gout and various sexually related diseases, syphilis and all sorts of things.

Ben Kingsley21:44

mainly because he was corroded by fame, and didn't have the wherewithal to cope with it. So I thought, well, there's a parable here for me.

Ben Kingsley21:53

Maybe the gods or the eagles or whatever that guide me are saying, Watch it.

Ben Kingsley21:58

So I did this here play. I kept it in my repertoire for two years. It was directed by my wife, Alison. And it finally, having opened in Harrogate to forty four people, got to Broadway, where we played to twelve hundred people a night and got standing ovations. But the central message of the play was an important one for me. Be very careful of fame. It can corrode.

Ben Kingsley22:24

And the piece of music you've chosen? Well, I would like to act like this, and I would like every entrance I make on stage to be like this. This is a piece of music written in fifteen fifty one, and it's called Pavin la Bataille.

Presenter23:38

Ben Kingsley, at present you're working very, very hard. You're in repertoire at the Barbican doing two parts. You're doing Othello and you're doing Melons. Let's talk about Othello. I mean, it's one of the great Shakespearean roles. How do you go about putting yourself into that part?

Ben Kingsley23:52

Yeah.

Presenter23:53

Well

Ben Kingsley23:54

Well, my telephone conversation with the director.

Ben Kingsley23:58

when we first discussed the possibility of playing Othello, took place under very extraordinary circumstances. I in fact was in Morocco filming, and I was playing the part of an Arab prince, modern Arab prince.

Ben Kingsley24:12

And I immediately became attracted to the idea of portraying him as a Moor, as an Arab, with that kind of temperament that is so rooted in honour, tradition, and appreciation of that which is beautiful and delicate, and at the same time rather like the Japanese, wedded to an undeniable violence, a combination of a capacity for great stillness and also for great violence, and not a lot of warning between the changes. And indeed the writing seems to bear it out. There is

Ben Kingsley24:45

A refusal to believe until it's inevitable that you do believe the worst, and then once the worst is known, there's no rather like Keen himself, there is no capacity to deal with the crisis. Keane suffered from it, too, when the myths of his life were taken away.

Ben Kingsley25:03

When we are robbed of our myths.

Ben Kingsley25:06

A terrible process of decay sets in and sometimes very, very swiftly. The veneer of civilization on us is, I think, terrifyingly thin.

Presenter25:27

What is that?

Ben Kingsley25:28

His voice, his North African voice.

Ben Kingsley25:31

The way that I heard men speak in Morocco.

Presenter25:34

Academic.

Ben Kingsley25:34

Yeah.

Presenter25:34

Okay.

Ben Kingsley25:34

Right now.

Ben Kingsley25:35

I can try, but uh it is hard for me without uh the script of the man. But there is uh gentleness, but uh there is there a strength and uh possible violence there. I mean we hear it now whenever Gaddify or Arafat are interviewed.

Ben Kingsley26:01

It's actually very slow and very measured and terrifying.

Presenter26:02

I see.

Presenter26:05

What about uh Melons then? Because again, the here you play a seventy four year old Apache Chief. He's another terrifying character. Where's the again the voice? How did you do the voice for that?

Ben Kingsley26:08

Here you best.

Ben Kingsley26:15

You see, he's based on Geronimo, and my character is based on the history the appalling, harrowing history of Geronimo, who returned home to find his children with their genitals cut off and his wife hacked to pieces. I mean, that man had a terrible time.

Ben Kingsley26:31

His life was based on revenge. That was his life. He was a revenge machine, strapped to a horse and a gun strapped to him.

Ben Kingsley26:38

I have been to New Mexico several times, he ended his days in New Mexico.

Ben Kingsley26:43

I talk to people there and listen to them, but uh of course one is

Ben Kingsley26:48

Catching the echo of an echo of an echo of something that's become a myth, but one realizes that there was a voice that did.

Ben Kingsley26:55

sit round a fire or or exalt his fellow warriors to fight, and it is that voice that I have to find. I play him seventy-four years old, but I also play him much closer to my own age. When he comes back as a ghost, my age is stripped away in a very quick change, and I return as an Apache warrior with you know long black locks and a rifle across my arms. Most extraordinary journey.

Presenter27:18

We're going to hear you in fact as in this next choice concourse.

Ben Kingsley27:20

As you are.

Ben Kingsley27:21

This is an eagle dance. I had chose to do this chant and my friend Guy Woofenden and I actually notated it down. Well, he notated it and taught me how to sing it.

Ben Kingsley27:33

And the text suggests that he is singing a song about flight, about flying, and it turns out by a wonderful coincidence to be indeed a San Ildefonso eagle dance, which is precisely where the play takes place, precisely the village that I visited when I was there, and the very metaphor that the play is trying to struggle towards as the old man ends his life.

Presenter28:26

Kingsley, is there a sense in which you believe perhaps that being an actor is a vocation, that you're driven along a path, that really.

Presenter28:35

You've no will to avoid.

Ben Kingsley28:36

It is a vocation. I don't know what the force is behind the voice that calls you. I think it's probably a chorus of many voices from one's childhood, one's first experiences. My favourite twentieth century philosopher, Camus, said that we spend much of our adult lives trying to recapture a precious collection of first incidents that occurred to us possibly in the first five months of our lives.

Ben Kingsley29:04

The room, the sitting room, with the light coming in through the window. It's it's that sort of thing.

Ben Kingsley29:09

And that certainly is part of that choral vocation, one's own ego, one's own needs.

Ben Kingsley29:16

Perhaps there are voices that come from before I was born. I'm pretty interested in reincarnation and what happens before and what happens after. Maybe that some of the people that I feel an overwhelming urge to play

Ben Kingsley29:34

Are actually knocking on some invisible plate glass and saying, play me, play me, play me. I don't know.

Presenter29:40

Who are they specially? Can you name a couple of

Ben Kingsley29:42

I d I can't until the ambush, it's one of my favorite words takes place, it's difficult to know. But once the ambush has taken place, I recognize those that are possible and those that are not. But it's a very sudden thing. It it literally is like a voice. Of course it comes in the form of a letter or a telephone call, but you recognize the voice as I did from Keen, as I did

Ben Kingsley30:05

With candy as well. Uh I I just felt a sort of link there.

Presenter30:11

Let's have a final choice of Barrett.

Ben Kingsley30:13

I called for your island.

Presenter30:13

Uh

Ben Kingsley30:13

Yeah.

Ben Kingsley30:14

This is a song by Forigner, they're a lovely pop group.

Ben Kingsley30:18

And um

Ben Kingsley30:20

I used to listen to this while my wife was pregnant and if we were blessed with a daughter.

Ben Kingsley30:24

This was going to be her Welcome into the World.

Ben Kingsley30:27

We had a son.

Speaker 230:32

So long.

Speaker 230:36

I've been looking too hard, I've been waiting too long.

Speaker 230:41

Sometimes I don't know what I would find

Speaker 230:46

I only know it's a matter of time.

Speaker 230:50

When you love some

Speaker 230:55

You love

Presenter30:59

Ben Kingsley, now all you have to concern yourself with is: would you escape from this island? Would you try?

Ben Kingsley31:04

I think that I'd be reneging on the experiment. I think I'd try and stay for a very long time.

Ben Kingsley31:09

I think I'd try and explore a bit of cuisine and probably make my own musical instruments out of what wood and stone and shells were available.

Presenter31:17

You're practically enough to do that, are you?

Ben Kingsley31:19

I'm pretty good with my hands, yes. I can mend most things that are broken within limits, but I mean I'm pretty good.

Presenter31:24

And what about the book?

Ben Kingsley31:25

It's a slim paperback called The Myth of Sisyphus and it's a collection of essays by Albert Camerou.

Presenter31:31

And what about the one record? Supposing seven were whisked away by some natural disaster or other?

Ben Kingsley31:37

Providing I could sing my eagle dance whenever I felt the urge, I think it would be the Vaughan Williams, because it's Mother England, it's Stratford, it's the mists rolling across the Cotswold Hills, it's vegetables from the garden, it's it's everything really. It's it's like a massive great embrace.

Presenter31:57

And the luxury item, the one luxury item that you can have on the island.

Ben Kingsley32:01

Oh, now. Probably a telescope, because I would love to look at the stars, and hopefully if the sky is clear enough over there

Ben Kingsley32:09

I could watch Haley's Comet, but I would love to look at the stars.

Presenter32:13

Ben Kingsley, thank you very much indeed.

Presenter32:15

Thank you.

Speaker 132:23

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