English actor Sir Ben Kingsley began his career with the Royal Shakespeare Company before branching out to films and TV. He won an Oscar for his starring role in the biopic Gandhi. Being of English-Indian descent, he has played a number of ethnicities — mostly avoiding anything cringe-worthy?
Of course, there’s some productions I just can’t find photos for:
- Lord Uplandtowers in Wessex Tales (1973)
- Thidias in Antony and Cleopatra (1974)
- Edgar Allan Poe in Omnibus: “The Need for Nightmare” (1974)
- Dr. John Elliotson in Dickens of London (1976-77)
- Dmitri Shostakovich in Testimony (1987)
- Sholomon in Secret of the Sahara (1988)
- Governor in Cellini: A Violent Life (1990)
Otherwise, let’s do this!
Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The Love School (1975)
A BBC TV series about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters.
Roberto Cibrario in Thank You, Comrades (1978)
All I’ve got is it’s a TV movie! It appears to be period (1920s?) based on images.
Mahatma Gandhi in Gandhi (1982)
A biopic of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948).
Frank Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982)
A TV adaptation of the Shakespeare play, part of the “BBC Television Shakespeare” series.
Duval in Camille (1984)
A TV movie adaptation of the Dumas novel, in which a courtesan falls in love with a “young man of promise” in 1840s France.
Silas Marner in Silas Marner (1985)
A TV film that adapts the George Eliot novel set in the early 19th century.
Lasker-Jones in Maurice (1987)
An adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel, about a gay man in Edwardian England.
Basil Pascali in Pascali’s Island (1988)
Set in 1908 on a fictional Ottoman-ruled Greek island, with a complicated plot about an archaeologist.
Dr. John Watson in Without a Clue (1988)
A Sherlock Holmes mystery film, in which Dr. Watson is the real brains.
Lenin in Lenin: The Train (1988)
A TV miniseries in which follows Russian revolutionary Lenin travels from Switzerland to Russia by sealed train through wartime Germany during the Russian Revolution (1917).
Simon Wiesenthal in Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story (1989)
An HBO TV biopic about the real-life Austrian Jew who survived concentration camps and went on to hunt Nazi war criminals.
Martin Boyne in The Children (1990)
A film in which some children object to their widowed father falling in love again.
Meyer Lansky in Bugsy (1991)
A biopic about mobster Bugsy Siegel and his affair with starlet Virginia Hill. Meyer Lansky is one of Siegel’s crime partners.
Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List (1993)
The epic Spielberg film about film Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish–Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. Stern is a Jewish official who handles the financial and administrative side of Schindler’s business.
Potiphar in Joseph (1995)
A TV miniseries about the biblical character.
Moses in Moses (1995-96)
Ditto!
Feste in Twelfth Night (1996)
The pre-Raphaelite adaptation of the Shakespeare play.
Reverend Templeton in Photographing Fairies (1997)
A fantasy film about the Cottingley Fairies hoax (1917-21).
Sweeney Todd in The Tale of Sweeney Todd (1997)
A Showtime TV movie adaptation of the Sweeney Todd story, but I don’t think it’s the musical version.
Porfiry in Crime and Punishment (1998)
A TV movie adaptation of the 1866 Dostoevsky novel.
Otto Frank in Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001)
A TV miniseries about the famed Dutch diarist who was murdered in the Holocaust.
Hermocrates in The Triumph of Love (2001)
A baaad adaptation of an 18th-century romantic comedy play.
Man in the Yellow Suit in Tuck Everlasting (2002)
An adaptation of the 1975 young adult book, about a teenage girl who falls in love with an immortal boy.
Fagin in Oliver Twist (2005)
He plays the antagonist — the leader of a child gang of thieves — in this feature film adaptation of the Dickens novel.
Kagan in BloodRayne (2005)
What I pray is a low-budget action horror film adapted from a video game.
Ambrosinus/Merlin in The Last Legion (2007)
A feature film that combines history of Romans in Britain and the King Arthur legends.
Nizam in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
An action/fantasy film based on a video game, in which “A young fugitive prince and princess must stop a villain who unknowingly threatens to destroy the world with a special dagger that enables the magic sand inside to reverse time,” per IMDB.
Georges Méliès in Hugo (2011)
A Scorcese film about a boy who lives alone in a train station in 1930s Paris, who becomes “embroiled in a mystery surrounding his late father’s automaton and the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès,” per Wikipedia.
Regent Miklos Horthy in Walking with the Enemy (2013)
Per Wikipedia: “The story is about a young Hungarian-Jewish man… who dons an SS uniform to pose as an officer to find out the fate of his family and to rescue fellow Jews from the Holocaust.”
Ibn Sina in The Physician (2013)
An 11th-century English orphan travels to Persia to study medicine. There he meets real-life physician/philosopher Ibn Sina aka Avicenna (c. 980 – 1037 CE).
Silas Lamb in Stonehearst Asylum (2014)
A psychological horror film loosely based on an Edgar Allen Poe story.
Nun in Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)
The biblical epic film about Moses; Nun is the Jewish man who tells Moses of his true heritage.
Merenkahre (Ahk’s Father) in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)
The third and final in a series of films about museum exhibits that come to life. Technically not a frock flick, but hey, there’s costumes?
Ay in Tut (2015)
A TV miniseries biopic about ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamun. Ay was Tut’s Grand Vizier/advisor, and later succeed him as pharaoh.
Woodruff in The Ottoman Lieutenant (2017)
A romantic film set during World War I in the Ottoman Empire, which totally bombed. The film, I mean.
Adolf Eichmann in Operation Finale (2018)
The story of Israel’s capture of the World War II/Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in the 1960s.
And Coming Up
? in William Tell (2024)
An adaptation of the German play, about “the greater Swiss struggle for independence from the Habsburg Empire in the early 14th century” (Wikipedia). Released at film festivals, and with very little information or photos out and about!
What’s your favorite of Ben Kingsley’s many historical roles?
BloodRayne had a budget of 25 million, which was not tiny in 2005 but it was also directed by Uwe Boll who famously (or infamously) does not have the strictest standards of quality (if I’m being polite) when it comes to his films.
Per the film’s own Wikipedia page: “Screenwriter Guinevere Turner turned in the first draft two weeks late. Rather than ask for redrafts, Boll accepted it and then made many of his own changes; and he then asked the actors to “take a crack at it”. Turner estimated only 20% of her script was actually filmed.”
Also the history behind the production of The Ottoman Lieutenant is more interesting than the film itself. It was released a month before (and entered into production before) the wide release (though after the film festival screenings) of The Promise, leading to some people either speculating or accusing The Ottoman Lieutenant of being made to counter claims of the Armenian genocide that form the backbone of The Promise’s plot.
Specifically a Turkish character (the titular Ottoman Lieutenant) is the primary love interest and the film depicts killings of Armenians as being unorganized acts of violence, rather than a systemic genocide (as depicted in The Promise). Additionally the New York Times reported on allegations that the Ottoman Lieutenant’s Turkish producers had arranged for the final cut, and – that due to the post-production removal of dialogue related to the Armenian genocide – “several people who worked on the project felt the final version butchered the film artistically, and smacked of denialism”
What a range of roles and films! Sir Ben has always been a fav.
I’m deeply amused that Sir Ben went from playing Moses to playing a Pharaoh who becomes the subject of a “The Jews were absolutely not Ok with being involuntary Egyptians” joke – now that’s range!
Interestingly his son F-E-R-D-I-N-A-N-D* also seems to be developing a certain amount of Frock Flick Chic (Courtesy of VICTORIA and THE SANDMAN).
*Yes, this is a joke based on the fact that I keep accidentally thinking of Mr Ferdinand Kingsley as ‘Fernando’ for which I blame ABBA and his being tall, dark & handsome.
I absolutely second the call for a sequel to this one featuring the younger Mr Kingsley (avoiding the ABBA earworm by referring to him as “Ferdie” helps, I find), who not only has spent about as much time in historical garb than not throughout his career but also has been known to joke about being the inevitable result for Google searches for “Ben Kingsley with hair”. To the point of actually subbing in for his father in The Last Legion as the younger version of the same character.
I will take his Feste in Twelfth Night, please.
For breakfast, lunch or dinner?😉