12/04/2025
He auditioned brilliantly but was told they couldn't place him. He changed his name, crossed the road, auditioned again—and they hired him immediately.
Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in 1943 in Yorkshire, England. His father was a Kenyan-born doctor of Gujarati Indian descent. His mother was an English actress and model. Growing up, everyone called him Krish.
By his twenties, he was pursuing acting seriously, landing auditions with major theaters. And he was good—directors praised his performances. But something kept happening that had nothing to do with his talent.
"I had one audition as Krishna Bhanji," Kingsley later recalled in an interview with Radio Times, "and they said, 'Beautiful audition but we don't quite know how to place you in our forthcoming season.'"
Beautiful audition. Can't place you. Come back never.
So in the 1960s, Krishna Bhanji became Ben Kingsley. He chose "Ben" as a tribute to his father, who'd been called Ben in college. "Kingsley" came from his grandfather's bookshop, King's Lee.
Then he went back.
"I changed my name, crossed the road, and they said when can you start?"
The same theater. The same talent. A different name. Immediate acceptance.
"As soon as I changed my name, I got the jobs," Kingsley said. "I suppose it says more about the 1960s than anything else."
But the discrimination went deeper than awkward casting directors. When Kingsley joined the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company in 1967, a senior director pulled him aside with what he thought was career advice.
"I was told by a very senior director at the Royal Shakespeare Company that he felt that I would always play servants, and never play kings and leading men, politicians, leaders of their country."
Always servants. Never kings.
Kingsley spent the next 15 years with the RSC anyway, performing mainly on stage. He played Hamlet. He played Othello. He starred in As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Then in 1982, director Richard Attenborough offered him a role in a biographical film about an Indian lawyer who became one of the most influential political and spiritual leaders in human history.
Krishna Bhanji—the man told he'd never play leaders—won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Mahatma Gandhi.
The irony wasn't lost on him. "I changed my clunky Asian name to a more pronounceable, and acceptable, universal name in order to play Mahatma Gandhi," he later reflected.
Over the decades that followed, Kingsley played Simon Wiesenthal, Itzhak Stern in Schindler's List, Otto Frank, the Persian Prince in Prince of Persia, and countless other historical and fictional figures of authority and significance.
Looking back on that director who said he'd only play servants, Kingsley said: "I'm ticking all the boxes here because I've played them all. You know, I think the best service somebody can do to me as an individual is tell me what I can't do, and I'll do it."
He was knighted in 2002 for his services to the British film industry. Sir Ben Kingsley—a title that director never imagined for the young man with the "foreign-sounding" name.
Today, Kingsley doesn't see his name change as a betrayal of his heritage. In fact, he later realized that "Krishna Bhanji" was itself somewhat invented—Krishna is a Hindu name, Bhanji is Muslim, and such a combination would never exist naturally in the Indian subcontinent.
"When I was on stage, I thought of myself as a landscape painter," he told Radio Times. "Now that I'm blessed with a film career, I see myself as a portrait artist, and for many, many years I have signed my portraits Ben Kingsley. That's who I am."
The name changed. The talent was always there. The difference was that finally, people were willing to see it.
