Call me Sir Ben

As the Hollywood glitterati gather for the 76th Academy Awards this Sunday, Sir Ben Kingsley waits to discover whether his peers will honour him once again. Fighting it out with, among others, fellow countryman Jude Law, should Kingsley win, he will be the first British performer to have won Best Actor twice in his career. Joining an exclusive roll call, 'Sir Ben' - as he rather pompously insists on being called - would then rank alongside the greats - Cooper, Tracy, Nicholson, Brando, Hoffman and Hanks. Not bad for a former

Judging by the meticulous performances he has delivered for the likes of Steven Spielberg (Schindler's List, A.I.) and Roman Polanski (Death And The Maiden), Kingsley would probably be happier with an award that read 'Best Reactor'. 'I love the camera because it stops me acting,' he says. 'I avoid that at all costs.' Not that you would notice when you meet him. He speaks like a trained thesp, his voice mindful of cadence and rhythm as if he's auditioning for a Shakespeare play. 'I've no idea how I'm perceived,' he adds. 'Once you think you know how you're perceived, you're onto a losing wicket. You start to play your own image. My image is I'm a free actor. I'm an entertainer. No shackles.'

When he enters the suite at London's Dorchester Hotel, he looks in rude health for his age - he turned 60 on New Year's Eve - despite a bandage around his right wrist from a weight-training accident. Sporting a navy Nehru-collared zip-up top over a plain white T-shirt, the dress code may be informal, but there's something decidedly regal about him. He has a profile fit for a king. That bald dome, the hooked nose and that intense stare from those black-marble eyes would look magnificent on a coin.

It's little wonder, then, that he's made a career from playing men cut from a different cloth to us mere mortals - those given the Kingsley touch include Lenin, Moses, Shostakovich, Simon Wiesenthal and Gandhi, his stunning 1982 screen debut made after 15 yearsworking for the National Theatre and the RSC. 'If you feel limited, then you will invite people to think that you are limited,' he says. 'If I don't think of myself in any way as limited, then people are quite confident in me.' For Gandhi, he practised yoga, learnt how to spin cotton and lost 20lb on a vegetarian diet. It won him an Oscar.

Nominated twice since, for Best Supporting Actor (for two gangsters, in Bugsy and Sexy Beast), this is Kingsley's first shot at the main prize since playing India's former leader all those years ago. The film in question is House Of Sand And Fog, which is based on the best-selling novel by Andre Dubus III and directed by first-timer Vadim Perelman. Once again, Kingsley - born in Yorkshire and raised in Salford, the son of an English model and a Ugandan Asian doctor - is drawn towards playing a character from overseas. This time it's an Iranian named Behrani, a former colonel who has fled his country for Los Angeles, only to find himself working menial jobs to try to keep his family in the manner to which they have been accustomed. A morality drama about immigration and imperialism, it sees Behrani enter into a bitter struggle with the former owner of his new house (Jennifer Connelly), who has seen her property wrongfully repossessed. 'They're the worst two people who can fight over this small patch of earth,' notes Kingsley. 'It's the basis of great tragedy.' While the film becomes a mite hysterical in its final reel, Kingsley's studied performance, complete with flawless accent, is the jewel in its crown.

He calls it 'the portrait I'm most fond of in my whole career', perhaps because it has seeped into his personal life. With two marriages behind him (he has two children from each), last September Kingsley wed 29-year-old German ad-exec Alexandra Christmann in secret near his home in Oxfordshire. Three months later, the pair renewed their vows in New York in a traditional Persian ceremony, presided over by an Iranian judge. Arranged by the family of co-star Johnny Ahdout, who plays Kingsley's son in the film, the ceremony saw bride and groom read out 14th-century love poems and taste honey from each other's fingertips. 'That shows you how close I got to the Persians on set,' he smiles. And following the lavish birthday party his wife threw for him at New Year, he adds, 'I think we'll be renewing our vows at quite a fast rate!'

Born Krishna Bhanji - he took the stage name Kingsley from his spice-trading grandfather's nickname, Clove King - he was an exotic-looking boy and knows a little of the alienation Behrani feels. 'At school, my brothers and sisters and I were the darkest people anyone had ever seen in their lives. When people came towards me, I never knew if they were going to hug me or hit me. I quickly had to learn where the other person was coming from.' Set to follow his father into medicine, he rejected the idea when he left school. He drifted into acting --though he was rejected from Rada and wound up writing and performing music for a stage-show produced by Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

Admitting he has never done anything 'other than pretending to be someone else', Kingsley has spent the past year filming in New Mexico (for FBI caper Suspect Zero) and Prague (time-travel thriller A Sound Of Thunder), capitalising upon his currently high Hollywood stock. 'Sometimes my family can travel with me, sometimes they can't,' he says. 'But it's a balance. I couldn't have one without the other. I honestly couldn't. That battle is my struggle. But it's a joyful struggle as I love both so much.'

Most notably, he spent the summer at Pinewood shooting a live-action featurelength version of TV sci-fi puppet show Thunderbirds, in which he will camp it up as chief villain The Hood. It was his 15-year-old son Ferdinand who urged him to take the role. 'He watched it as a very small child,' says Kingsley. 'Now he's found a hat that he wears that's covered in Thunderbirds badges!' Once admitting he would love to have played the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman, this is the actor's chance to catch up with fellow RSC alumnus Sir Ian McKellen in the blockbuster stakes. Asked whether he's ready for a plastic action figure to be made in his likeness, Sir Ben demonstrates a hitherto hidden sense of humour. 'Oh yes, please!'

House Of Sand And Fog opens Fri 27 Feb.