‘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.