Happy Birthday Sir Ben Kingsley!

Happy Birthday Sir Ben Kingsley!  Sir Ben started at the Royal Shakespeare Company.  Highly recommended is Playing Shakespeare (1982), a documentary series that is hosted by John Barton and features some of the best actors like Sir Ben Kingsley, Sir Patrick Stewart Dame Judi Dench,  and Sir Ian Mckellan, amongst many other incredible actors. It is not only great on Shakespeare and his lays, but also the craft of acting.  He moved to television and then became a sensation playing the lead role in Lord Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982).  The film won eight Academy Ards including Best Actor for Sir Ben.  He later won a 1985 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for “The Words of Gandhi.”  One of his first genre roles was playing Avatar in Steven Linsberger’s Slipstream (1989).  An early voice role was the lead in the animated movie Freddie as F.R.O.7. (1992).  Next, Sir Ben played the instructor to the chess prodigy, Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993).  

Then, he played Itzhak Stern, in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).  In 2000, Sir Ben was in crime drama Sexy Beast and then the drama, House of Sand and Fog (2003).  He was made a Knight Bachelor in 2002 for achievements in entertainment. Sir Ben starred in the video game adaptation of BloodRayne (2005).  I absolutely love Sir Ben’s performance as Ambrosius, the mentor to Romulusu Augustus, in The Last Legion (2007) based on the Valerio Manfredi novel.  He followed it up playing Nizam in another video game adaptation, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), I love that film too.   Sir Ben played visionary filmmaker, Georges Méliès, in Martin Scorsese’s fantasy, Hugo (2011), based on the Brian Selznick book.   He entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe playing actor Trevor Slattery in Iron Man 3 (2013). 

Sir Ben played Mazer Rackham, who sported interesting facial tatoos, in Ender’s Game (2013) based on Orson Scott Card’s sci fi novel.  He was also Merenkahre in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tom (2014).  Then, Sir Ben played the villainous Snatcher in Laika’s animated film The Boxtrolls (2014).  I was part of the Boxtrolls press roundtables and Sir Ben entered casually; t-shirt and jeans, but he radiated charisma.  I asked him to compare Snatcher with Richard III and was just stunned that he said he never played Richard III and explained his process in approaching a role.  Sir Ben brought an elegance to voicing Bagheera in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book (2016).  In 2018, he voiced General Woundwort, in the television animated mini-series Watership Down based on the Richard Adams' novel. He was in the spy thriller Spider in the Web (2019).  Sir Ben appeared this year in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.  Happy Birthday Sir Ben Kingsley!  

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