Ben Kingsley

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The actor's art baffles the rest of us. “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?” Hamlet wonders about the player. Ben Kingsley, right, himself an admired Hamlet and probably the most adored actor in the world last year after his performance as Gandhi (he aged fifty-four years believably in three and a half hours), is now asking the question about Edmund Kean, the great nineteenth-century tragedian who was ruined by scandal and self-obsession. Kingsley’s triumphant one-man show, Kean, which was written especially for him by Raymund FitzSimons and directed by his wife, Alison Sutcliffe, moves from London to Broadway this month.

There's little overlap in the flamboyant character of Kean and the true character of Kingsley. “Kean had no domestic life, only the life of the dressing room, the stage, the tavern,” says Kingsley, who is immensely involved in private life at the moment as a new father. Just as Kean in the play goes in and out of character, so Kingsley sometimes goes outside the character of Kean to make his own tender comment upon the man whose genius he does not impersonate but honors, and whose personal tragedy he pities. Kean thought he knew his worth and exaggerated the public's opinion of it. Kingsley, who was born Krishna Bhanji in Yorkshire thirty-nine years ago, believes that acting is a gift, which he with great humility asks us to accept from him.

Is it all for nothing, as Hamlet speculates, all for Hecuba? People often fainted watching Kean play Othello. What will American audiences do watching Kingsley play Kean?

PATRIC KINMONTH