Posts Tagged ‘Patricia Clarkson’

TIFF 2014: Learning to Drive’s Ben Kingsley always a fan favourite at TIFF

00_11_TIFF_Ben-KIngsley_MD_DEAN-1200x750By Richard Crouse – Metro Toronto

Outside the Elgin Theatre premier for his new film Learning to Drive, Sir Ben Kingsley caused quite a stir. He signed autographs, posed for pictures with fans, one of which gushed effusively after he walked away. “He’s my favorite,” she told your reporter excitedly.

When I tell Sir Ben about the enthusiastic fan he smiles broadly.

“If it means that she’s heard the story and it touched her, then I’m delighted,” he says. “The important thing for me is to tell the story. I’m sure I am a storyteller. I’m sure that is the right place for my DNA to be.

“Something happened to me and it stayed with me forever. I was playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company and I was walking in open field just outside Stratford Upon Avon. A lovely young woman was on the opposite side of the field and seemed to be walking towards me, so I decided to tack to my right to avoid her feeling that I was intruding on her space. She tacked to her left. In other words, she mirrored me. Then I went the other way and she mirrored me. She was determined to meet me in the middle of this field. Then face-to-face, she said, ‘I saw Hamlet last night. How did you know about me?’ Something [I did] must have gone right in there [he points to his heart], straight through the sternum and I said, ‘I know.’ That’s the connection.

“It never left me. If it means that through storytelling something has been shifted, healed, touched in her, great. Good.”

In the TIFF film Learning to Drive he reunites with his Elegy co-star Patricia Clarkson. She plays Wendy, a divorcee who hires Darwan (Kingsley) to teach her how to drive so she can travel to upstate New York to visit her daughter. As she learns to navigate Manhattan’s mean streets, the pair form a bond, teaching one another about life and love.

“I think in a really beautifully fashioned play or screenplay you have a feeling that the gods look down and say, ‘I’m going to bring you two together,’” says Kingsley. “I love that idea in mythology that the gods look down and send somebody to somebody. It is only through very unfortunate, heartbreaking circumstances that Wendy finds herself in a taxi. Heartbroken. I am driving a heartbroken woman. And I loved in the way, as in all great stories, the little coincidences are the gods guiding and bringing people together for some purpose. Here it is not for a great romance, it is to heal.”

Darwan is the latest in a long list of characters, like Mohandas Gandhi, Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List and Sexy Beasts’ Don Logan that have surprised Kingsley.

“I don’t know where they are,” Kingsley says about his characters, “if they’re inside me waiting to come out or whether they are outside of me. Are they hunting me or am I hunting them? I don’t know. I love to be surprised by a script and I was very pleased and delighted by the opportunity to play what Patricia Clarkson’s character coins as a ‘good man.’”

The versatile Ms. Clarkson RICHARD CROUSE FOR METRO CANADA September 10, 2009

In the TIFF entry Cairo Time, a magazine editor played by Patricia Clarkson finds herself in Gaza falling for a man who isn’t her husband.

It’s a romantic drama about self discovery and just the kind of role we’ve come accustomed to seeing Clarkson play — serious and complicated.

Her best known work has a weight to it that seems to come naturally to her. Perhaps it is her deep voice or the fact that she’s never really played the ingénue, but I always associate Clarkson with capitol “S” serious films. According to her, I’ve got it all wrong.

“I think most people see me as much darker, more serious and possessing a certain gravitas, when I’m really quite insane,” says the New Orleans born actress.

She chalks up her onscreen image to — what else? — acting. “I go where I need to go. If I need to look glamorous or spiffy or young, or battling cancer, or a drugged-out hippie type, it hopefully will be projected in my face. That’s the beauty of acting. It’s not about hair and makeup; it’s about being malleable.”

That pliability has paid off handsomely in many of her lesser known films.

In High Art, Clarkson plays Greta, a forgotten actress who once starred in Fassbinder films. She’s a drug addict so far gone she actually falls asleep during sex. It’s a colourful, theatrical performance, but Clarkson carefully avoids the clichés of playing a junkie.

On a happier note is Simply Irresistible, a screwball romantic comedy in the vein of 1930s musicals. In this charming film, Clarkson plays Lois, a wisecracking secretary.

“If you need anything call me,” she says to her boss, “although I don’t know how to do anything except buy clothes.” She’s a decidedly earthbound character in this fantasy about a chef whose guardian angel gives her a gift that turns her food into the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Darker than Simply Irresistible is the creepy horror film Wendigo. Promoted as a cross between The Shining and Deliverance, it plays with classic horror conventions — city folks in the country pitted against psycho rednecks and the supernatural — but does so in a unique and compelling way. As usual Clarkson shines as the NYC mother thrown into a situation she doesn’t understand.

These, and her other 40 plus film credits, prove that Patricia Clarkson is as versatile as she is malleable.