A twist in this ‘Oliver’: Ben Kingsley’s wistful Fagin

Fagin, the Jewish fence who befriends and betrays the titular character in "Oliver Twist," is an opportunist and a schemer.

As interpreted by Sir Ben Kingsley in Roman Polanski's film adaptation, he is also a vulnerable, fearful survivor who is ultimately alone in the world.

"I speculated that maybe his grandparents came to England with this little child who didn't speak a word of English," Kingsley recently mused at a junket for the film in Manhattan. "They were holed up in some strange place in the East End. [And] these Russian-speaking grandparents died when he was still a child. Then he was out in the streets fending for himself, and then you have two orphans in the same room. You have Fagin and Oliver, having a strange understanding of one another and a strange interdependence, and eventually a bond between them."

"Oliver Twist" opens Sept. 30 in the Bay Area.

Fagin is not only scarred by his childhood, Kingsley imagined, but he is marginalized as a Jew.

"It was a very severely restricted society," Kingsley points out. "The professional avenues were severely limited of what Ashkenazis could do in London. It basically came down to you can buy and sell secondhand clothes, you can be a ragpicker and you can unofficially lend money."

Kingsley flew into New York from Tunisia for the weekend, where's he's shooting the Roman epic "The Last Legion." But he easily cast his thoughts back to mid-19th century London.

"So the legal openings for Fagin — for my young, abandoned Fagin — were severely limited," he continued. "In the East End, you learned to live off your wits as you would in Rio de Janeiro now. You become a street kid, and your aspiration would be to be the toughest kid on the street and then to have your own street kids when you grow up. It's a very, very limited perception of what the world is, which Fagin has."

The actor, who starred a decade ago in Polanski's "Death and the Maiden," maintains that the two men had no discussion about how to represent Fagin's Jewishness.

"Because of our great affection for one another, that debate never infected the workspace or worried us," says Kingsley. "I was just allowed to explore Fagin as a collapsed patriarch, as a distorted parent figure. Terribly corrupted and distorted, but somewhere inside is that tradition — he mentions it when he's dressing [Oliver's] wound. 'Handed down from father to son, father to son,' and then he stops and says, 'But I don't know where from.' As if his tribal memory snapped. And I found that very sad in him."

Ronald Harwood, the Jewish screenwriter who won an Oscar for his adaptation of "The Pianist" for Polanski and scripted "Oliver Twist," likewise had no conversations with the director about how to portray Fagin. But the book's anti-Semitic shadings were easily excised, he found.

"If you read the book, only Dickens refers to him as a Jew," says Harwood, who was born in South Africa and moved to England as a teenager in 1951. "The characters never say, 'Oh, Fagin, the dirty Jew' or 'Fagin, the evil Jew.' So as long as I'm only dramatizing the scenes, I can be faithful to that."

Kingsley has played several Jews who endured persecution, notably in "Schindler's List," and one would expect the actor to bring tremendous empathy to his portrayal of Fagin. But, remarkably, his heartbreaking performance manages to reflect the consequences of one form of anti-Semitism while anticipating another.

"I got enormous information and was hugely stretched by being allowed to play Simon Wiesenthal, to play Itzhak Stern, to play Otto Frank, and have some inkling of what those years must have been like," Kingsley says quietly. "It's filtered through so many layers, but that yellow star on those three coats that I'd worn in Europe, and working with Roman, who suffered so much during the Holocaust, gave me a place to stand as Fagin in which that issue was never debated at all."