Career CPR

Ben Kingsley

By Shane Jenkins

April 1, 2009

I'll grant you the beast part but not that he's sexy.

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Dear Sir Ben Kingsley,

We need to talk.

I promise you this comes out of a place of genuine respect and admiration for your talents. Plus, I know several people who have met you and have had nothing but nice things to say about you. You are a gifted actor and, that rarity among the famous, a seemingly decent human being. So it's with a bit of a heavy heart that I must declare aloud that which you must already be aware - lately, you have been choosing projects that are not worthy of having you in them.

Let's back it up a little. After several years of performing in British television series, you became internationally famous for your Academy Award-winning role as Gandhi, in Richard Attenborough's 1982 film. You brought shading and depth to a part that could easily have been simplistic and overly beatific in the hands of a lesser actor. You were not afraid to show the flaws behind this famous figure, and in so doing, made him seem real. I consider it to be one of the all-time great film performances, and, for better or worse, it became your signature role in the eyes of the public.




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But you're far from being a one-trick pony, and you demonstrated your range in a variety of top-notch projects in the '80s, including roles in Harold Pinter's Betrayal, Merchant/Ivory's Maurice, and a great comic turn as Dr. Watson in the underrated 1988 film Without a Clue.

From my perspective, 1993 was the pinnacle of your career, a year in which you gave three memorably great performances. You were the sympathetic Vice President in Ivan Reitman's charming-if-slight presidential comedy Dave. You also gave what I consider to be the best performance in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winner Schindler's List. And, in my favorite role of yours, you were a stern chess instructor in Searching for Bobby Fischer, one of my most beloved movies of the '90s.

So it was little weird, then, seeing you in Species, a trashy and incoherent gloss on Alien. It mostly seemed like an excuse to have Natasha Henstridge be naked a lot, and I remember thinking it was odd that you were lending your name to something so, well, terrible. "Everyone's allowed a misstep sometimes," I thought, and just figured they had paid you a lot of money and it was an anomaly. But in fact, it was foreshadowing the direction your career would take in the 21st century.

After a couple more years of mostly doing TV, you roared back onto the scene in 2000's Sexy Beast, giving an iconic performance as the raging gangster Don Logan. Logan couldn't be further from Gandhi, and really showed your range. You are roughly the same age as Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, but, unlike those guys, you have managed not to turn into a caricature of yourself. You are a genuine character actor, and I can't ever recall seeing you "phone it in" the way they do these days.


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