Ben Kingsley Movies and Career Information

Sir Ben Kingsley, CBE (born Krishna Pandit Bhanji (Gujarati:કૃષ્ણા પંિડત ભાનજી); 31 December 1943) is a British actor. He has won an Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards in his career. He is known for starring as Mohandas Gandhi in the film Gandhi in 1982, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in Snainton, near Scarborough, Yorkshire, England, the son of Anna Lyna Mary (née Goodman), an actress and model, and Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, a medical doctor. Kingsley's father was born in Kenya of Gujarati Indian descent; Kingsley's paternal grandfather was a spice trader who had moved from India to Zanzibar, where Kingsley's father lived until moving to England at the age of 14. Ben Kingsley's mother, born out of wedlock, was "loath to speak of her background"; she was the daughter of an English mother who worked in the garment district of East London, and a father who was believed by the family to have been a Russian or German Jew. Kingsley grew up in Pendlebury, near Salford. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School, an independent school in Manchester in north-west England, where one of his classmates was the