Ben Kingsley, the actor who shed his Indian name and won an Oscar being Gandhi

When Krishna Pandit Bhanji decided to start going by Ben Kingsley, the calculation was simple and painful. He was young, he was British, he was the son of a Gujarati Indian father and an English mother, and he understood that the British stage and film industry of that era had narrow ideas about who could play whom. The name change was not a reinvention — it was a tactical retreat. What he could not have anticipated was that it would eventually look like the most ironic decision in modern acting history: a man who anglicized his identity in order to get parts, and then won his Academy Award embodying the most recognizable Indian figure of the twentieth century.

He was born in the village of Snaith in Yorkshire, the son of Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, a Gujarati actor and physician from Jamnagar, and an English mother of Kenyan-Irish background. His father had ambitions; he encouraged his son toward performance. Ben Kingsley — the stage name was in place by the time he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967 — spent roughly fifteen years earning his craft on stage before film gave him the career it could not yet quite see coming. Those RSC years produced something specific: an actor trained in a tradition that prizes stillness, precision, and the willingness to be wrong onscreen. He played Hamlet. He played Othello opposite Ian McKellen. He accumulated a quality of attention that the camera later knew how to use.

The Gandhi offer came with a weight most actors would refuse. Richard Attenborough had been trying to make the film for nearly two decades. The role required two years of preparation — months studying Gandhi’s physical mannerisms, learning to spin cotton, losing more than twenty pounds, living something close to the philosophical discipline the man himself had practiced. The result, released in 1982, did not look like acting in the conventional sense. It looked like inhabitation. The Academy Award for Best Actor that followed was not the surprise. The surprise was that Kingsley spent the subsequent decade methodically proving that Gandhi was not the only thing he could do.

The films he chose after Gandhi were, with some notable exceptions, not the obvious moves for an Oscar winner with a prestige audience. Bugsy, in 1991, gave him Meyer Lansky — understated, loyal, and ruthless — alongside Warren Beatty. Schindler’s List cast him as Itzhak Stern, whose quiet bookkeeping of human survival earned him a BAFTA nomination. Then came Sexy Beast, and Don Logan: a compact, explosive gangster from whom menace radiates not as performance but as physics. The Oscar nomination for Sexy Beast was, for many critics, more surprising than the one for Gandhi — not because the film was lesser, but because the character was so deliberately repellent and so impossible to look away from. House of Sand and Fog brought a fourth nomination, this time as Colonel Behrani, an Iranian military officer whose dignity collapses against the American machinery of property law.

The controversy over Iron Man 3 was real, and its afterlife has been genuinely strange. Kingsley was cast as The Mandarin, appeared in trailers that suggested a terrifying, politically charged villain, and was then revealed in the film to be Trevor Slattery — a burnt-out British actor hired to perform the role of terrorist as theatrical spectacle. Some audiences felt deceived. Others recognized something smarter: a commentary on what acting is, on who gets cast as which kind of threat, and how cinema manufactures fear from borrowed imagery. The mistake was assuming Kingsley had phoned it in. He had not. He returned to the character in the Marvel short All Hail the King, in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and most recently as co-lead of the Disney+ series Wonder Man, which premiered in January 2026. The character that seemed like a throwaway has become, over twelve years, one of the stranger and more philosophically interesting figures in the MCU — and it took an 82-year-old to make that visible.

He married his fourth wife, actress Daniela Lavender, in 2007. He has four children from previous marriages. He was appointed Knight Bachelor in 2002 — Sir Ben Kingsley — a title he takes seriously, as any number of stories from film sets confirm with consistent amusement. The decision to insist on the title reads, depending on who tells the story, as either pomposity or a very specific correction: the man who surrendered his birth name to get work has found another name entirely worth protecting.

The pace of 2025 and 2026 would embarrass most actors in their forties. The Thursday Murder Club, an adaptation of Richard Osman’s novel, arrived at Leicester Square in August 2025, placing Kingsley in a cast alongside Helen Mirren, David Tennant, and Pierce Brosnan. Desert Warrior, a historical epic opposite Anthony Mackie, came out in April 2026. Deep Water, a survival thriller, followed in May. Young Washington, in which he plays Robert Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, is set for release in July 2026. And The Old Stories: Moses, a dramatic series for Prime Video, features Kingsley in the title role — another figure whose identity exists at the intersection of faith, history, and a name that carries more than one civilization’s claim on it. In 2025, the Uzbekistan Centre for Islamic Civilization engaged him as narrator for ten international documentaries about Islamic history, connecting, at some remove, to his Gujarati Muslim paternal heritage.

What keeps the career from being merely archival is that none of this looks like winding down. It looks like someone who has decided, having spent sixty years accumulating characters, to spend whatever time remains on the ones that resist easy resolution. The name Ben Kingsley chose in his twenties is the one history will keep. The work he has done inside it refuses, still, to hold still.

Tags: actors, British cinema, Steven Spielberg, Ben Kingsley, Schindler's List