After winning an Oscar for his first starring film role, Ben Kingsley has gone on to play a bewildering array of parts.

Steve Pratt talks to the Scarborough-born actor about his forthcoming roles - as an exiled Iranian colonel, and the villain trying to take over Tracy Island.

HE'S a knighted Yorkshireman, born Krishna Bhanji, and a best actor Oscar-winner for playing a great Indian leader. He's as likely to be seen playing a New York gangster or Nazi war criminal.

This summer the chameleon-like Sir Ben Kingsley will be seen as the villainous Hood in the movie version of the puppet hit Thunderbirds.

But if ever a role had his name on it, it was Iranian colonel Massoud Amir Behrani in House Of Sand And Fog.

Not that film-maker Vadim Perelman knew that when he bought the book at Rome airport to read on a long plane journey. By the end of the flight the successful commercial director had decided he wanted to film the story of two dispossessed people whose battle for ownership of a house threatens to destroy them both.

His first, and indeed only, choice for the leading part of the once-powerful colonel, who's fled his native Iran for the US and earns a living doing menial jobs, was Kingsley.

What he didn't know what was the star of Gandhi, Schindler's List and Sexy Beast was way ahead of him. The actor had been sent a copy of Andre Dubus III's book by the author's wife, Fontaine, around the time of publication.

"She said in her letter that her husband had me in his mind's eye while putting Behrani on the page," he recalls.

"I guess there was a rough sketch, or starting point, or scaffolding. The kind of thing you throw away when you've finished. It was a step that he took in creating Behrani, then hopefully dispensed with, as you do with scaffolding after finishing the building."

Kingsley's name was mentioned when Perelman spoke to Dubus about filming his book. "I thought, of course, perfect and from then he was the lynchpin of the casting process," recalls the first-time feature director.

HIS intuition that Kingsley was perfect casting has paid off - the actor has been Oscar-nominated as best actor for his performance.

In the story, the proud Behrani is reduced to working on a road construction crew and in a convenience store to support his family.

The actor admits he's been lucky enough not to have to take other jobs apart from acting.

"I was auditioned by a Theatre-in-Education company when I was 20. They gave me the job, I started with them, I went straight from them to rep, from rep to Chichester, and from Chichester to the Royal Shakespeare Company" he says.

"I've never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I'm deeply fortunate."

Perelman could relate personally to the immigrant experience, as he and his mother left their home in the former Soviet Union when he was in his teens. Eventually, they settled in Canada. Kingsley's background is diverse too. He was born in Scarborough, son of a Kenyan-born doctor of Indian descent and an English-born fashion model.

Pinpointing the effect of his background is something he finds hard. "It's very difficult to be objective about one's childhood because you have no perspective on it. I have nothing to compare it with. The only way I can lead any kind of a comparative life is to portray other men," he says.

"In my own experience, in portraying other men and earning my money by pretending to be somebody else, it has stamped me with what the actor is - tribally central and socially peripheral.

"I enjoy this status so much, feeling that I'm close to the heart of the tribe as an actor, a storyteller, a troubadour, but socially quite distant because I don't fit into any particular comfortable slot.

"There's always a part of me that's migrating. That's so much part of my attempt to portray all these different men. The sense of being displaced from my home, homeland and language is a very real part of my working life, but I've never suffered from it in the way that Behrani has. I have never felt bereft of anything. I've never gone through anything remotely like that.

"Everything that's made me what I am today is part of that process of being intrigued and curious. But I really couldn't put my finger on any specific trigger from my childhood."

His film commitments rule out this great pretender returning to the stage for the time being and, besides, he's not desperate to tread the boards again. The reason for that is because he's completely in love with film as a medium. He likes the minimalism it forces on the actor, the economy and the truth that the camera insists on.

"I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour" he says.

"So I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting. I avoid that at all costs and love it when the camera is watching the behaviour of my character.

"Who knows? I may return to the stage, but not in the foreseeable future."

While he continues to snag such a diverse collection of screen roles, he's likely to remain faithful to the cinema. The title role in Richard Attenborough's epic Gandhi was his first leading film role after 15 years more or less solid stage work. Since then, he's appeared in a variety of screen guises whose scope is unequalled by few other actors. He's an actor who's given us everything from a Jewish accountant in Schindler's List to the voice of a frog in the animated Freddie As F.R.O.7

NO wonder he resists naming a favourite part, saying he's had the "most extraordinary opportunities". Eventually he commits himself. "In terms of fondness of a portrait that I've done of somebody, Behrani is possibly the portrait I'm most fond of in my whole career," he says.

"Maybe because it's recent, fresh and the response has been gratifying. But when I watch the film, it's a man I deeply care for on the screen."

His upcoming role as the villainous Hood in Thunderbirds, the live action version of the cult puppet series, offers yet another side of Kingsley. Not that he approached the project any less seriously than he did House Of Sand And Fog.

Making Thunderbirds was a "joyful experience", and he has nothing but praise for the American director Jonathan Frakes. "That was a film for children and directed by a man of great taste. It was a joyful experience and he never once trivialised what we were doing," says Sir Ben.

"There's nothing worse than taking your children to a bad pantomime where they are having more fun on stage than the kids are in the audience. It's insulting, it's demeaning, it's excluding.

"This was a genuine piece of 60s mythology about heroism and anti-heroism that was made with a big heart and we all had a wonderful time making it."

* House Of Fog And Sand (15) opens in cinemas on February 27.