His stiff-necked, blazing-eyed performance in Sexy Beast is comparable to anything in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance, picking up where James Fox left off in portraying a working-class hard man in meltdown. But whatever it is that's going on in Kingsley's personal life, it has not harmed his acting. "Did that come completely from left field?" I wasn't aware that he and his second wife, Alison Sutcliffe, had separated (so much for cuttings). He interrupts me: "Look, just in case it leaks into the interview, I am single right now - I am as an individual single, there is no partner in my life, just in case you've misunderstood anything I've said." I am by now absolutely dumbfounded. The next question seems obvious: does he have someone to read his work? At this, he flashes the smirk again: "I don't remember." Then, in the iciest of tones, he says: "I digressed, I'm sorry." He's sitting bolt upright now and the withdrawal of his approval is so intense, so total, I can only gulp like a school kid and make a ham-fisted attempt at changing the subject. I ask if he needs an audience for such work and he immediately says he needs somebody to read his writing. We're talking about Kingsley's other interests, which include painting, photography, music and writing. And then, for some reason, the bubble bursts. I'm in his warm bubble and it's a cosy place to be. He even sits calmly, stretching his legs along the right-angled sofa we've been sitting in as if it were an exercise mat. Kingsley has the exaggerated serenity of a yoga teacher and, like a teacher, enunciates every syllable and repeats every clause with the evident hope that in this way his words will sink in. Kingsley turns his head and says with an alarming smirk, "I don't remember." Huh? "It's not for this interview." So why - I wonder - did you say it in front of me? The interview begun, things go much more smoothly. Feeling somewhat left out, I ask who Lucille is. Kingsley flicks his eyes over to the PR: "You know, the first thing Lucille did was bend down and pick up a four-leaf clover." They laugh.
As we're introduced by the nice PR woman, he notices my necklace and demands, "Is that a four-leaf clover?" It's not. The day I meet him, Kingsley is in a mixture of moods.
Or at least made him want to talk about how shaken up it's always been. Something, though, has evidently shaken up this Yorkshire-born 56-year-old's world. Conscientious and content in equal measure, Kingsley seems like one of the least wounded men alive. His family life (he has four kids, two from his first marriage, two from his second) sounds similarly benign. Kingsley goes into raptures about the actors he's worked alongside, directors go into raptures about what he's like to work with.
Perusing his cuttings, whether for small projects (Pascali's Island, Turtle Diary) or big (Bugsy, Schindler's List), it's hard not to feel as if you're entering a warm, establishment bubble. Plucked out of Royal Shakespeare Company obscurity at the age of 38 to star in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, he became an instant British institution. Kingsley describes Estragon as "going mad" and Logan as "on the fringes." He loves them because they're "wounded." This is not a word one associates with Kingsley. The other is south London gangster Don Logan, who can be seen in his new film, Sexy Beast. By CHARLOTTE O'SULLIVAN Of all the characters Ben Kingsley has played on stage and screen, he says two feel like "twin brothers." One is Estragon, the tortured tramp in Waiting for Godot.
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