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).
Sir Ben Kingsley
Mahatma Gandhi
for Mahatma Gandhi in The Organizer: The Life of Bayard Rustin
Suggested by sofly
A movie about the life of Civil Rights organizer Bayard Rustin. Bayard Rustin was an american Civil Rights and Gay Rights activist. Born in 1912 in West Chester, Pennsylvania Bayard was heavily influenced by his Grandmother's Quaker Beliefs which included Civil Rights and Pacifism. He became an activist from an early age even joining the Communist Party as a youth but soon left over there support for World War II. He traveled to India where he studied non-violent protest and civil disobedience from Mahatma Gandhi himself. Later when he returned to America he continued his fight for Civil Rights. He met Martin Luther King Jr. and taught him the non-violent philosophy he learned from Gandhi. The two soon became allies and close friends in the struggle for civil rights as Bayard organized several important civil rights demonstrations. But their partnership and friendship suddenly ended in 1960 when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. a black minister and congressman from New York threatened that if King didn't cut all ties with Rustin he would reveal Rustin's 1953 arrest in Pasadena for having sex with another man in a parked car. It was an open secret in civil rights circles that Rustin was gay but this had been the first time a fellow civil rights activist had used that against him. He also threatened to tell the press that King and Rustin were gay lovers. King reluctantly agreed and distanced himself from Rustin who would later resign from the SCLC the organization he and King had founded. But Rustin was far from done with civil rights activism. Three years later Black Activists planned to March on Washington to protest segregation and there was only one logical choice over who should organize it. Bayard Rustin. Although Senator Strom Thurmond tried to discredit the march by calling Rustin a communist and a homosexual it didn't change anything. Thanks to his help the March on Washington went off without a hitch and became one of the most important moments in American History. Bayard would continue to fight for civil rights and eventually gay rights until his death in 1987.
