The many Middle Eastern faces of Ben Kingsley.
In his long and storied career, Sir Ben Kingsley has played Lenin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Simon Wiesenthal, Meyer Lansky, Moses and Sweeney Todd. Thanks to his half-Indian background, he's also frequently been a go-to generic Middle Easterner: one of his first parts was as a Pakistani cab-driver in Mike Leigh's 1973 TV movie "Hard Labour," Mohandas K. Gandhi in, uh, "Gandhi," and -- of course -- Guru Tugginmypudha in "The Love Guru." Now, he's back to the well once more for "Taj," playing Shah Jahan, the 17th-century Indian Mughal emperor "best known," as Variety puts it, "for building the Taj Mahal" in memoriam to his late wife, Mumtaz Mahal. As Kingsley's wife Daniela Lavendar, who is set to co-star, explains, "The idea is to transform this into a 'Rome'-style adult period drama, bringing out the sex and sexuality underlying everything in that society, its adultery and jealousy." Given that Mahal died...
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