Myra Mcfadyen

Sir Ben Kingsley, a British film actor of Indian descent, was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in Scarborough, Yorkshire, in 1943 and raised in Pendlebury. He studied at Salford University and later trained at Pendleton College in Lancashire, which now houses the Ben Kingsley Theatre. His father, Harji Bhanji, was a Kenyan-Indian medical doctor, and his mother, Anna Lyna Mary, was a former actress who was involved in cinema in the 1920s. A master actor who has appeared in many significant films, he achieved his greatest success with Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi. The film won a total of 8 Oscars, and Kingsley won the Best Actor Oscar for his magnificent performance as Mahatma Gandhi. Other major roles for Kingsley include Itzhak Stern, the accountant in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List; Don Logan in the 2000 film Sexy Beast; Masoud Behrani, the Iranian immigrant in the 2003 film House of Sand and Fog; Dr. John Cawley in Martin Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island; and Georges Méliès in another Scorsese film, Hugo, in 2011. Kingsley has four children: Thomas and Jasmine Bhanji from his marriage to actress Angela Morant, and Edmund and Ferdinand Kingsley from his marriage to theatre director and actress Alison Sutcliffe. He was married to Alexandra Christmann, a German national, from 2003 to 2005. Since 2007, he has been married to Daniela Lavender. He lives in Spelsbury, England. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002.