Krishna Bhanji is having an incredible run of good fortune.
You might know the man: His stage name is Ben Kingsley, Sir Ben Kingsley -- acclaimed actor.
"It's wonderful," Kingsley told The Sun in a telephone interview from New York. "This year has been amazing: my third Academy Award nomination and a knighthood. Both sides of the Atlantic have claimed me as a team player!"
Last month, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed the knighthood on Kingsley, the 58-year-old son of an India-born doctor and an English model.
At last month's Oscars, he was nominated as best supporting actor for playing the corrosive psychopath Don Logan in Sexy Beast.
His accolades do not end there: Kingsley won the best supporting actor prize for Sexy Beast from the Toronto Film Critics Association, as well as critics groups in a clutch of other centres from Boston to San Diego. He also earned Emmy and American Film Institute nominations for his sterling work as Otto Frank in a new TV version of Anne Frank.
Kingsley's latest film release, Clare Peploe's whimsical intellectual fairytale The Triumph Of Love, is set for its theatrical release on Friday after playing the Toronto filmfest as a gala in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy last September.
The mood is better now for The Triumph Of Love. Based on French writer Pierre Marivaux's 1732 play and set in the sun-drenched splendour of the Italian countryside, the film co-stars Kingsley, Mira Sorvino, Fiona Shaw and Jay Rodan.
It is a comic romp that has Sorvino bending her gender and, in different guises, seducing both Kingsley and Shaw while secretly lusting after the handsome prince, played by Rodan. Kingsley is a pompous philosopher, Hermocrates.
"It's colourful and intelligent," Kingsley says. "It's vivid and a thorough investigation of ideas and patterns of human behaviour. Amongst our characters, what we get is a love of ideas and a love of discussing and debating and living out ideas. Therefore, it demands a certain degree of brightness and urgency (from the actors)."
Kingsley loves the contrast between the brute he played in Sexy Beast and the fop he plays in The Triumph Of Love.
The Italian-British film, produced in the English language by Peploe's long-time partner, filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, looks at "the human condition" with an infectious giddiness, Kingsley says. Which means he has the chance to explore a side of himself as an actor that delights audiences.
"It's joyful and effervescent and laughable and buffoonish," he says of the tone of the performance.
Sexy Beast is quite another matter. "It's dark and sinister and terrifying." Yet it is also entertaining, he says. "We're allowed to see that aspect of ourselves and it doesn't hurt anyone because it's up there on the screen."
None of his performances stays with him long, except perhaps for fragmented memories, Kingsley says. "I see myself very much as a portrait artist. I paint the portrait. It's hanging in the gallery. People come and see it. I let go."
As a result, on occasions such as the Oscars, he is free to bask in the glory, no matter what the result. In this case, he lost the prize to countryman Jim Broadbent for Iris.
"You know," Kingsley says musing, "they don't take your nomination away from you. And, of course, I can go home having been nominated best supporting actor and look at my best-actor Academy Award on my library shelf (for Gandhi, 1982). So I really have the best of both worlds."
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