Sir Ben Kingsley, (born 31 December 1943), born Krishna Pandit Bhanji 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. He is also known for his performances in the films Schindler's List (1993), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010), and House of Sand and Fog.
Kingsley was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji in Snainton, near Scarborough, North Yorkshire, England, the son of Anna Lyna Mary (née Goodman), an actress and model, and Rahimtulla Harji Bhanji, a medical doctor.
Kingsley's father, born in Kenya, is 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 actor Robert Powell. He later studied at the University of Salford and at Pendleton College, which later became home to the Ben Kingsley Theatre.
Kingsley has been married four times and has four children: Thomas Bhanji and artist Jasmin Bhanji, with actress Angela Morant, and Edmund Kingsley and Ferdinand Kingsley, both of whom became actors, with theatrical director Alison Sutcliffe. In 2005, he divorced German-born Alexandra Christmann, having been "deeply, deeply shocked" after pictures of her kissing another man surfaced on the internet.On 3 September 2007, Kingsley married Daniela Lavender, a Brazilian actress, in North Leigh, Oxfordshire.
He currently lives in Spelsbury, Oxfordshire, England, where he has resided for more than ten years
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