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Quotes by Ben Kingsley

A cello's soul is the resonance that makes it unique: how it was made, when it was made, who's played it. Mine may be who my parents were, what I know about life, who I love and have loved. All that makes my bones resonate. If a director is fortunate enough to tap into that, it's an endless well of information.
– Ben Kingsley
All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.
– Ben Kingsley
As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now.
– Ben Kingsley
As an actor there's no autonomy, unless you're prepared to risk the possibility of starving.
– Ben Kingsley
Being a leading man on a film set under the direction of somebody like Dickie Attenborough is very empowering, and you have to be extremely careful how you use that power.
– Ben Kingsley
But comedy I'd love to do as much as humanly possible.
– Ben Kingsley
But filming is good for you, because the crew isn't allowed to laugh. You can't get addicted to getting the laugh.
– Ben Kingsley
By the time I was 22, I was at Chichester Festival Theatre, and at 22 auditioned for Trevor Nunn, bless him, who, when I was 23, allowed me to join the Royal Shakespeare Company.
– Ben Kingsley
Certainly I was aware of the comradeships that were forged during the film.
– Ben Kingsley
Everything that's made me what I am today is part of that process of being intrigued and curious. But I really couldn't put my finger on any specific trigger from my childhood.
– Ben Kingsley
Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.
– Ben Kingsley
Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.
– Ben Kingsley
Great drama deals with the struggle for people's selves. You see it on the screen. Everyone is involved with the struggle with their own soul, struggling for that soul and to possess that soul.
– Ben Kingsley
Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.
– Ben Kingsley
Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn't going to work.
– Ben Kingsley
I always try to find something I admire about every character I play.
– Ben Kingsley
I always try to make whatever character I'm playing a completely whole human being, with integrity, morality-or the lack of. I try to give the audience an opportunity of looking at the screen and recognising something.
– Ben Kingsley
I am not a classical actor; I am an entertainer. I fell into classical acting by mistake and actually started out as a singer. I wrote the music for a musical play and it transferred to London and I sang the songs in London.
– Ben Kingsley
I am-hello!-an actor, an entertainer, a song-and-dance man. can do anything.
– Ben Kingsley
I didn't go to drama school because, from the first refusal I then, as I said, a couple of weeks later, was offered a professional job, where I am immensely grateful to the journey.
– Ben Kingsley
I do despair sometimes. I was working with an actor recently who was so passionate to get into the role of a... borderline personality case, to say the least, that he would be shouting and screaming and pumping up and doing press-ups before the take and kicking the furniture - and hurting his hand once he banged it so hard... he forgot all his lines! Forgot everything, he'd exhausted the character off the set and arrived a wreck.
– Ben Kingsley
I do have a massive curiosity.
– Ben Kingsley
I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.
– Ben Kingsley
I don't honestly think people know what acting is.
– Ben Kingsley
I don't think that making ourselves invulnerable to feeling any onslaught to our feelings will help us in life, ultimately. I think we only learn and grow by allowing ourselves to be really challenged by those feelings that do overwhelm us occasionally.
– Ben Kingsley
I enjoy this status so much, feeling that I'm close to the heart of the tribe as an actor, a storyteller, a troubadour, but socially quite distant because I don't fit into any particular comfortable slot.
– Ben Kingsley
I find it thrilling to listen to two people playing with language like John Travolta and Samuel Jackson talking about hamburgers. I mean, that's a scene about language. And when the cinema does do scenes about language, it's wonderful to be in that room listening to how these people talk. I think cinema can celebrate language as well as use silence as a great device.
– Ben Kingsley
I found the absolute thrill of translating ancient poetic text into totally visceral, tangible and even relevant, immediate and urgent language... I was thrilled by Shakespeare. It surprised me, my profound delight in deciphering Shakespeare and making it completely flesh-and-blood.
– Ben Kingsley
I have a rather naive approach, I think, to my job.
– Ben Kingsley
I have done three makeup tests and I'm very, very happy with them. I am completely unrecognizable.
– Ben Kingsley
I have never felt bereft of anything.
– Ben Kingsley
I have no misconceptions about my dentist because when I go to my dentist I see what he does... Nobody can really understand the process of acting because... we don't want them to.
– Ben Kingsley
I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I'm waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.
– Ben Kingsley
I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.
– Ben Kingsley
I just think that on the bedrock of his creative genius, there resided in Shakespeare a male psyche and a female psyche and that they both dwelled very creatively and energetically inside him.
– Ben Kingsley
I just try to do the things that I respond to, that just grab me when I read them for whatever reason. It's hard to put your finger on it.
– Ben Kingsley
I knew India not at all. I mean, I had never been before in my life.
– Ben Kingsley
I like to do one or two films a year. But I can't prepare for something until I know what it's going to be. So I find that doing some narration, or maybe a documentary, is like going back into the gym for a couple of days.
– Ben Kingsley
I love creatures in their pure form.
– Ben Kingsley
I may return to the stage, but not in the foreseeable future.
– Ben Kingsley
I met Simon Wiesenthal. I met him in Vienna and I had lunch with him. I witnessed his survivor's guilt first-hand. I witnessed him describing the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp by the Americans in May '45. I witnessed the profound waves of emotion that he was trying to deal with and balance in his own old body, and that gave me some minuscule, tiny pin-hole camera into the true horrors of the Holocaust, which are incomprehensible, indescribable, unforgettable, possibly unforgivable.
– Ben Kingsley
I might be asked to make an emotional expression which is me being absolutely, absolutely still and making maybe one movement, and there it is.
– Ben Kingsley
I now see on the screen certain ways in which Gandhiji greets people, how he treats every single individual in his life as somebody precious, valued and never never to be humiliated, but uplifted and elevated.
– Ben Kingsley
I suppose an actor is largely made up of empathy, one has to be empathetic in order to act, and perhaps those antennae are out when meeting directors and when reading the script. When the empathy and the chemistry is completely out of whack, the days are interminably long and very, very difficult and you know in your heart that the film isn't going to work.
– Ben Kingsley
I think a good horror film can also include sexuality and passion and tensions and sensitivity, and I think if a horror film embraces all this mediums, then it can be a very sensually exciting event for the audience so that they are attracted and horrified at the same time. They're compelled towards this very positive force and at the same time they are frightened of it.
– Ben Kingsley
I think I'm more bonded, emotionally and in a craft sense, to films that tell extraordinary stories about extraordinary destinies.
– Ben Kingsley
I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.
– Ben Kingsley
I think it's probably honest to say that there's a certain powerful stillness that I remember admiring tremendously as I grew up. And that would be Spencer Tracy... and Bogart and that particular approach to the work. The stillness, the economy, the grace of that work, so they would have been then, my heroes on the screen.
– Ben Kingsley
I think one of my main moments of inspiration was when I was about 5.
– Ben Kingsley
I think Romeo and Juliet is uplifting. That's how much a son wishes to avenge his father. That is how much two young people can love each other.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that really the director should try and shape what is there. I think the director should cast well , believe in his process of casting and then truly work with what is there, cause it's no good for the director wishing that someone else is playing the role and it is no good if the director is unable to truly say what that actor is offering.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that Shakespeare had his male side and his female side extremely well developed. And this was a great quality of the Elizabethan, all-around Renaissance man. They were not afraid of their male side and their female side co-existing. This somewhere along the line got lost. And then it got misunderstood.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that the secret is, again it brings me back to balance and a kind of mathematics. I realised this, and it was a shocking realisation, it was quite terrifying: that when I was playing Hamlet, I realised there was no way round it, for the two-and-a-half hours of that play I had to be as intelligent as the most intelligent man in dramatic poetic literature. I had to hold together.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that the stamina, the marathon stamina that you required of your actor, I probably developed on great texts during my Shakespeare tenancy, if you like.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don't understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things.
– Ben Kingsley
I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.
– Ben Kingsley
I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.
– Ben Kingsley
I think with those who are gifted to make epic cinema, the vision required, again, is that the equation between the director and the story and the leading protagonists has to be one of mathematical precision and balance and grace. It's not possible to put the epic sweep of history that held Gandhi's life on screen unless the director himself has those qualities in him or her.
– Ben Kingsley
I told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was.
– Ben Kingsley
I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.
– Ben Kingsley
I try not to make it easy for myself. I try very hard to stay in the moment. I'm not an actor who psyches himself up for a take. I do the opposite. I actually try and reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce, reduce and get to what I call a flat line or a zero.
– Ben Kingsley
I use my intuition, my imagination, my voice and my body. That is really what actors do. There is a lot of nonsense talked about acting, but really all we do is use our voice, our body, our imaginations to create portraits about people so that you and the audience can be pulled into beautiful stories.
– Ben Kingsley
I was fortunate as a young actor, to go straight to the RSC, where I learned that being an actor can bring with it wonderful responsibilities.
– Ben Kingsley
I was very lazy in the sixth form at school, I wasn't motivated properly, I handled it very badly and I was not given a place at university to study medicine.
– Ben Kingsley
I wasn't particularly strong in the dramatic society, the drama group. I left Manchester Grammar School with abysmal A-level results. I then had a year's hiatus where I didn't know what to do at all.
– Ben Kingsley
I would like to make it known, on this program, loud and clear, that I would absolutely embrace with all five of my arms being a Bond villain.
– Ben Kingsley
I'm a hopping maniac, and if I didn't have that disciplined channel to pour this maniacal energy into, I'd probably go berserk.
– Ben Kingsley
I'm convinced that had I not changed my name, I don't think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.
– Ben Kingsley
I'm holding a mirror to the audience and telling them there is a violent person in all of us.
– Ben Kingsley
I'm not very good at analysing past strategies and choices.
– Ben Kingsley
I've met holocaust survivor victims, through other films, and I know what survivor guilt is like.
– Ben Kingsley
I've never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I'm deeply fortunate.
– Ben Kingsley
If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.
– Ben Kingsley
If people are generous with their information, then the actor can use that information lovingly and respectfully.
– Ben Kingsley
If the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.
– Ben Kingsley
If we hit the collective nerve of the audience on that night, that they would be standing up and rushing towards the stage to hug us.
– Ben Kingsley
If you start to victimise yourself, as an unworthy component in a beautifully constructed machine, that component is going to fail the machinery.
– Ben Kingsley
If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.
– Ben Kingsley
In cinema, the leading player is the director.
– Ben Kingsley
In England, it's now Sir Ben. Mister has just disappeared. It's not even on my passport anymore. They've taken Mister away from me.
– Ben Kingsley
In my own experience, in portraying other men and earning my money by pretending to be somebody else, it has stamped me with what the actor is-tribally central and socially peripheral.
– Ben Kingsley
It doesn't get any easier. I still get very nervous and excited, but I'm hoping... what I'm trying to do is simplify. That's what I'm trying to do.
– Ben Kingsley
It is better for me to serve a charity as an actor or a voice, rather than at a luncheon being just a celebrity.
– Ben Kingsley
It would frighten me if I were to learn somewhere along the line that all of those emotions had been suppressed throughout my entire life, that would be very scary, because nature would express them, somehow, in some form.
– Ben Kingsley
It's always very touching when you find a character on the screen who is fiercely defending your character.
– Ben Kingsley
It's no good arriving on the set whining about not feeling up to it. It's part of the job, whilst you're there and whilst you're employed, to find the necessary energy and commitment to meet the energy and commitment of the director. Moments of self-doubt are not indulged in while you're working. You just have to sleep, learn your lines and get back on the set and do your job.
– Ben Kingsley
It's very difficult to be objective about one's childhood because you have no perspective on it. I have nothing to compare it with. The only way I can lead any kind of a comparative life is to portray other men.
– Ben Kingsley
John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.
– Ben Kingsley
Maybe it's not a very businesslike approach, but it's always what attracts me... I do believe that it is that energy, that wonderful energy of the ancient craft of storytelling that will ignite something in the listeners.
– Ben Kingsley
Moses had a very bad stammer. Aaron often had to speak for Moses when he was in front of the pharaoh and could not articulate.
– Ben Kingsley
Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.
– Ben Kingsley
My guiding light was not learning to spin or having my trailer lined with photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, or my yoga classes - that's the mechanics of it... But the true guiding light, my yardstick of decency, intelligence and a profound respect for my fellow men was finally pushed out of my larynx and onto the screen - into a performance that is - it's based on you, it belongs to you, you are my guiding light and that is how I did it.
– Ben Kingsley
Now, I had feelings of unworthiness before I walked onto the set, and I have feelings of pride and wonder and astonishment and disbelief when I see what we managed to achieve on the screen.
– Ben Kingsley
Of course, silence in the theater, when you know that that silence is being sustained before your eyes by a group of actors on stage can be equally thrilling. I think we undervalue silence as a very powerful currency. I think we're frightened of it right now. We fill it at the least provocation.
– Ben Kingsley
Once I start painting, once I start acting and working, it's not a holiday. It's not a respite, but it is, in a sense, a balance, but it's of equal weight. It's a balance; it does balance out.
– Ben Kingsley
One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.
– Ben Kingsley
People have been, as I said earlier, crushed and distorted and forced into all kinds of strange postures as human beings because of circumstance. I don't know what monsters and demons would be in me if I felt that violence was the only way out of a very dark corner.
– Ben Kingsley
Quite often when I'm cast in a movie, I'm asked to bring whatever intelligence is there to the surface.
– Ben Kingsley