Age: 82
male
Sir Ben Kingsley (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji; 31 December 1943) is an English actor. He has received accolades throughout his career spanning five decades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Grammy Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, as well as nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards and two Laurence Olivier Awards. Kingsley was appointed Knight Bachelor in 2002 for services to the British film industry. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010 and received the Britannia Award in 2013. Born to an English mother and an Indian Gujarati father with roots in Jamnagar, Kingsley began his career in theatre, joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967 and spending the next 15 years appearing mainly on stage. His starring roles included productions of As You Like It (his West End debut for the company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1967), Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Also known for his television roles, he received four Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his performances in Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story (1989), Joseph (1995), Anne Frank: The Whole Story (2001), and Mrs. Harris (2006). In film, Kingsley is known for his starring role as Mahatma Gandhi in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982), for which he subsequently won the Academy Award for Best Actor and BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. For his portrayal of Itzhak Stern in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), he received a BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role nomination. He was Oscar-nominated for Bugsy (1990), Sexy Beast (2000), and House of Sand and Fog (2003). His other notable films include Maurice (1987), Sneakers (1992), Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), Death and the Maiden (1994), Twelfth Night (1996), Tuck Everlasting (2002), Elegy (2008), Shutter Island (2010), and Hugo (2011). Kingsley played the character of Trevor Slattery in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in Iron Man 3 (2013), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and the upcoming Disney+ series Wonder Man. He also acted in the blockbusters Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) and Ender's Game (2013). Kingsley lent his voice to the films The Boxtrolls (2014) and The Jungle Book (2016).
Ben Kingsley
The Architect
for The Architect in The Matrix (2012)
Suggested by thedispearing
The world is a simulation. To a young person living in the shadow of the Great Recession, that kind of horror resonates. Of course, some things would have to be be changed. After all, what was relevant in 1999 isn't necessarily salient in 2012! The Wachowskis, with all due respect to their fantastic Matrix films, one through four, were Generation X to the core, and with a new millennial vision, the series would be more relevant to a social media-adept youth. For one, in high contrast to the hollow optimism promised under 1990s capitalism, the early 2010s saw despair in the wake of America's once-thought-to-be secure financial institutions collapse, leaving a broken youth in its aftermath. Instead, the focus is completely shifted; for one, it's a romance now. Absurd, I know, but consider this: Neo, a lost-and-confused young college graduate, meets Trinity, who seems to know all about the wild dangerous truth of reality and accepts that things WON'T get better. Still, Neo's youthful desire to change things for the better attracts and impresses her, in this epic of two young lovers trying to liberate humanity from the Matrix.
