Actor: Ben Kingsley

Ben Kingsley won Best Actor for Gandhi in what was effectively his first film lead, having spent fifteen years with the Royal Shakespeare Company beforehand.

The subsequent career deliberately avoided repeating it. Sexy Beast gives him Don Logan, a small man of such concentrated aggression that the film cannot contain him, and it earned a nomination in the opposite direction from the first.

Schindler’s List, House of Sand and Fog and Death and the Maiden fill out the serious work, and he has taken a considerable amount of paid genre work alongside it.

He was born Krishna Bhanji and adopted the stage name early, which he has discussed as a practical decision about British casting in the 1960s.