Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
British actor who won an Oscar for playing Gandhi in Richard Attenborough's film.
On the island
Eight records
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas TallisFavourite
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.
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.
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.
Next record is for and about my son Edmund. It's everything that I think his childhood is at the moment, having built him a snowman in the garden this year.
Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram (Theme from Gandhi)
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.
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.
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.
This is a song by Forigner, they're a lovely pop group. And um I used to listen to this while my wife was pregnant and if we were blessed with a daughter. This was going to be her Welcome into the World.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:46Ben, I didn't realize until I started reading about you that in fact you're a Yorkshireman.
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... Crossing the Pennines... and I went to live in Lancashire.
Presenter asks
1:14Ben Kingsley wasn't your name in those days, was it?
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... I opted for Ben Kingsley because of my father's nickname, which was Ben... 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.
Presenter asks
2:44What about music in those early days? Was there much music in the house? Were you interested in music at all?
There was a tremendous amount of music in the house. My mother was a fashion model in her young days, and also she played small roles in films... My father, who was born in East Africa, had brought over with him as a student lots of Indian seventy eights... So I was brought up on a diet of big bands and um sitars and tablos extraordinary mixture
The keepsakes
The book
Albert Camus
It's a slim paperback called The Myth of Sisyphus and it's a collection of essays by Albert Camerou.
The luxury
Probably a telescope, because I would love to look at the stars, and hopefully if the sky is clear enough over there I could watch Haley's Comet, but I would love to look at the stars.
Presenter asks
5:57What decided you to make a career as an actor?
It was fairly late on, I think I was nineteen, when I voiced a conscious decision... I pursued my physics, my chemistry, my biology, my zoology. To become a doctor, like my brother, like my father. I think that was an emotional decision for me... I loved the role. I was hooked on Doctor Kildare at the time... And I thought uh that would be a good part for me in life.
Presenter asks
6:58Wasn't there one moment which changed your mind, which took you away [from medicine]?
Well, there was. I was fortunate enough to go to um Stratford-on-Avon when I was nineteen on holiday... And I stood and watched Ian Holme. Play an astonishingly dangerous Richard the Third... This is where I want to be, this is what I want to do... it was that afternoon Wythe and Holme that suddenly rocketed all the molecules that were there, dormant, to the surface.
Presenter asks
9:47Ben Kingsley, you went to Rada and were turned down by Rada... But how therefore did you learn how to be an actor?
Well, after my audition for Rada... I then auditioned for uh three repertory companies, Stoke on Trent, Huddersfield, and York, and they all accepted me straight away... And we did documentaries and classics and Shakespeare and modern plays... 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.
“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.”
“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.”
“When we are robbed of our myths. A terrible process of decay sets in and sometimes very, very swiftly. The veneer of civilization on us is, I think, terrifyingly thin.”