‘I never talk to anybody’

So Ben Kingsley, or, as he apparently demands to be called, Sir Ben Kingsley, who are you? I’m sitting in a windowless corridor in the Dorchester Hotel, waiting for him. It’s amazingly pink, this corridor. It looks like a cake. He comes out to collect me and he doesn’t look like he belongs here at all.

Perhaps it’s because misery clings to all his famous roles — Gandhi, Simon Wiesenthal, Otto Frank, the sociopath gangster Don Logan, the accountant Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List. And now he’s neither in prison nor a concentration camp, but standing behind an enormous teapot, looking as Home Counties as a John Lewis valance.

We sit down and I am slightly tongue-tied because I think he’s a great actor, one of the best. His performance in Schindler’s List was astonishing. When I say so Kingsley says ‘Gulp’, very theatrically. Then he goes into a long spiel about how the premiere of his new film, The Prince of Persia, is taking place all over the world today.

The film is awful, as bad as movies get, and I am hoping he’ll roll his eyes, admitting in code how terrible it is, but no, he’s quite serious about pretending this schlock was a great experience: ‘It’s terribly exciting.’ I haven’t bothered turning on the tape recorder for this, but he points at it and says, ‘You can turn it on.’ His body language is relaxed but watchful. His accent is from nowhere.

Ben Kingsley, I know, has two methods in interviews. Sometimes he talks about growing up near Salford in the 1950s. He was called Krishna Bhanji then. His father, the Indian GP, drank and ignored him; his mother, the half-Jewish housewife, accused him of theatricality and ignored him too.