Sir Ben Kingsley talks to Russell Baillie about how his most famous role connects
to his latest part and reflects on his prolific screen career
He might have won an Oscar for playing the most famous Indian of the 20th century, but Sir Ben Kingsley hasn't played many more figures from the subcontinent in the 30-plus years since.
He's portrayed a United Nations-worth of ethnicities, including the half-Maori space warrior Mazer Rackham in 2013's space battle movie Ender's Game, complete with full facial moko.
But the man born Krishna Pandit Bhanji to an Indian father and English mother hasn't played another Indian - unless you count "Guru Tugginmypudha" in the Mike Myers flop The Love Guru - since his breakthrough in Sir Richard Attenborough's Gandhi in 1982.
However, he is now. In Learning to Drive, Kingsley plays Darwan Singh Tur, a New Yorker Sikh cabbie and driving instructor.
It's a small two-hander of a film with Kingsley's dignified character befriending Patricia Clarkson's brittle Manhattan book editor after her marriage falls apart.
She hires him to help her get her licence, in order to make her more independent; and from her he gets a woman's perspective on his impending arranged marriage.
It's not just Kingsley's first Indian character in a while, it's a rare leading role after a decade racking up scene-stealing supporting turns in films from Brit gangster flick Sexy Beast to the hilariously fake villain of Iron Man 3.
Sarita Chouldhury and Sir Ben Kingsley in a wedding scene in Learning to Drive. (Supplied)
And while it might not seem that the epic biopic Gandhi that gave Kingsley a big screen career and this modest American independent film have much in common other than the birthplaces of its leads, there is a tie.
"There is an anecdotal relationship," says Kingsley, having paused a spot of script reading in his Los Angeles garden to talk to TimeOut, "that while I was filming Gandhi I did have a wonderful Sikh bodyguard driver. We were there months and he travelled with me around me around India. Wonderful guy.
"I honestly didn't realise this until yesterday; 'My goodness, a lot of my performance is based on Mr Gumar'."
The film, directed by Isabel Coixet, has Kingsley's character as a former professor who has sought political asylum in the United States where he faces the occasional racist taunt for his turban.
"I got so used to it that it felt strange when I took it off," laughs Kingsley about the permanent headwear. He had an adviser to help him with it and in matters of Sikh custom, with the production filming inside a real temple in Queens.
"It was most gracious of them to let us in. Working with these wonderful people, by osmosis it helps to focus your portrait."
As for the driving lessons on the streets of Manhattan, fortunately Clarkson could actually drive.
"So, yes, we did our own stunts."
While the film may accompany the pair on a few bunny-hopping laps of New York, it's actually another deeper kind of journey, says the actor
"It's almost like the fabled ferryman who gets you on board his little ferry on one bank of the river, you cross the ferry with him and you disembark on the other bank and you feel, 'My God, I have learned something. I don't quite know what it is, but something happened as I crossed the river with that guy'."
"Both these characters undergo changes that they wouldn't have undergone if they weren't thrown together into each others' lives. That simply is the beauty of this role."
Sir Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson in Learning to Drive (Supplied)
It's one of more than a dozen films Kingsley has worked on in the past two years, with his forthcoming releases also including sci-fi thriller Self/Less where he plays a dying tycoon who has his consciousness transferred into a new body belonging to Ryan Reynolds.
And he's back in New York in The Walk, the dramatisation of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit's walk between the Twin Towers in 1974.
He first went to the Big Apple with a play back when he was part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Kingsley might have arrived on the big screen with Gandhi but his acting career dates back into the 1960s. He played "Ron Jenkins" for five episodes of Coronation Street in 1966-67, its Manchester setting not far from where he grew up in nearby Salford.
He has no regrets than Ron didn't last and no, he doesn't watch the show any more.
"But I am sure it is just as realistic, as thoroughly well written and acted as it always was," he says diplomatically.
That was about the same time he met the Beatles backstage in London when he appeared in a musical play produced by the band's manager, Brian Epstein. Kingsley wrote some songs for the play and the Fab Four complimented him on his efforts, he says.
"It was a nice, exciting few days where I was almost in another world."
Still, the encounter came in handy years later in Iron Man 3 when Kingsley's supposed villain was revealed as Trevor, a jobbing actor from Liverpool who looked and sounded a bit like Ringo Starr.
With roles in IM3 and Ender's Game, might it be that Kingsley is finding a younger following?
"I'm not sure if they recognise me or they think 'Oh, that is that bloke with tattoos. That's that bloke in Iron Man 3. I don't think they know my name."
At the age of 71, it seems Kingsley's prodigious output continues and sometimes he's not too fussy whether he's working with Scorsese (as he did on Shutter Island and Hugo) or on films destined to go straight to DVD.
Some of that work ethic he says may date back to his theatre days and the anxiety of the next job.
"But what a job to need, I love it so much. It's a wonderful way for me of impressing my thumbprint on the world. I just can't conceive of any other life."
Where would he be without Gandhi? "Very different. It was a golden door through which Attenborough invited me into the world of cinema.
"Don't forget I did 15 years in the Royal Shakespeare Company and that stretches you so much and gives you stamina and gives you a relish for telling stories and defining that classic human being who is caught in the turbulent forces of history. So Gandhi was almost an extension of my work in Shakespeare, if you know what I mean."
Another possible factor in Kingsley's enduring career is that he's aged rather well over the years.
"I do disguise myself, don't I? Darwan Singh looks very different to Don Logan in Sexy Beast. It's the same guy."
