Quotes of the Day

He looked so familiar. but the two passersby who stopped a bald man last December on the steps of Rockefeller Center in New York City weren't sure who he was. That imperial nose, the batwing ears, those bore- into-your-soul eyes ... "You're a movie star, right?" they asked. Ben Kingsley smiled and quietly replied, "Yes." Their confusion didn't surprise Vadim Perelman, who directed Kingsley's new film, House of Sand and Fog, and was with him at the time. Over the past 40 years, the British actor has morphed into many larger-than-life figures — Moses, Hamlet, Gandhi. "He embodies his characters," says Perelman. Ben Kingsley disappears, and another man comes to life. "He's a chameleon."

Kingsley's latest guise, as exiled Iranian Colonel Massoud Behrani in House of Sand and Fog, adapted from Andre Dubus III's 1999 novel, has earned him a Best Actor nomination at this Sunday's Academy Awards. He's pleased with his fourth Oscar nod, and he'd love to add another trophy to the one he took home for Gandhi (1982). But his ambitions are bigger than any industry prize. He's on a mission to restore the tradition of tragedy — think Shakespeare or Sophocles — in a world fond of "illusory and bogus" happy endings. His medium may be film, but Kingsley, 60, prefers the label "storyteller." "And when I use the word storyteller," he says, "I use it in the ancient tradition — one who excites, who shows, who heals."

There seems to be a lot more hurting than healing in House of Sand and Fog, which pits Kingsley's Behrani against Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly). Both have seen better days. He, a lionhearted military man who has lost his country but not his will to power, clings to his pride and decorum, changing into a suit after his grimy, sweaty workdays on a road-construction crew so that he can go home to his wife and son in white-collar dignity. Connelly plays a recovering alcoholic struggling with depression who makes the critical error of failing to pay her property taxes. He uses his savings to buy her California home at auction — a step toward rebuilding his family's prosperity. She believes the house is still rightfully hers and battles back — with deadly consequences.

Though Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays his wife, Nadi, have both won acclaim and Oscar nods for their performances, some critics panned the film's tragic Shakespearean ending. ("Smacks of overreach," complained the Chicago Tribune.) But Kingsley puts the film in league with ancient dramatic traditions that used less plausible, more hyperbolic plotlines to pound home a point. "The Greeks embraced tragic drama," he says. "We are a society dedicated to the outlawing of tragedy, and we outlaw it at our peril." (He's exaggerating a bit — this year's other Oscar contenders include fine modern tragedies like Clint Eastwood's melancholy Mystic River.) Movies like House spring from "the ancient tradition of telling heartbreakingly sad stories, but hugging each other afterward," he says. "Audiences can recognize themselves and their own doubts."

He won't speak of any personal tragedy — a question about his youth yields only a curt pointer back to the movie. "My childhood had no exile, no struggle, no trauma like the Behranis," he says. Kingsley was born Krishna Bhanji, the son of a Kenyan-Indian doctor and an English actress, in Yorkshire. In a 1989 Daily Express interview, he said that growing up mixed-race in the '50s made him "an oddity ... I was the darkie one." At 19, he saw Ian Holm's Richard III and realized that the stage would allow him to become anyone he wanted to be. He changed his name, paying homage to his spice-trading grandfather, whose nickname was King Clove. Before long, he had earned a place in the Royal Shakespeare Company, the troupe that helped him fall in love with drama.

The stage veteran surged into film with the title role in — and Best Actor Oscar for — Gandhi. Since then, his role choices have reflected a love for the big character. He has played Moses, Lenin, Simon Wiesenthal and Anne Frank's father Otto in TV movies, and won two Oscar nods for playing gangsters — Meyer Lansky in Bugsy (1991) and, a decade later, Sexy Beast's Don Logan, the Cockney-accented human incarnation of rage. "It is archetypes that I drift toward as an actor," Kingsley says. Almost all of them are touched by tragedy, including his upcoming role opposite Annette Bening in Mrs. Harris, the true story of the philandering Scarsdale-diet inventor Herman Tarnower, who was killed by a jilted lover in 1980.

Attention-grabbing roles are now his routine, but Kingsley hasn't forgotten how it feels to be a novice. Unsurprisingly for a man who answers questions with earnest soliloquies befitting a drama professor, he enjoys teaching. He gives several master classes a year and says that, even in interviews, "young actors are the ones I'm talking to." His 2001 knighthood only intensified his desire to help the next generation: "If my country is going to honor me with the title 'Sir,' I'm going to have to give back." His most recent student: Jonathan Ahdout, 14, who plays Behrani's son and found Kingsley an eager mentor. "One of the tips that really helped me was not to act at all," Ahdout says. "He opened his arms to me as a father," setting the tone for the relationship. By the time they filmed the scenes that show the depth of Behrani's love for his son, says Kingsley, "neither of us was acting."

Hear the primal wail that seems to come from the most desperate corner of Behrani's soul, and you'll believe it. "It's all in the moment," says Kingsley. "The reality of tragedy is horrible." But he's shown that it can also be heart-wrenchingly beautiful, even without the happy ending.

• JEFF CHU
• Ben Kingsley shows why he's a master teller of heart-wrenching stories