More than 20 years after his Oscar-winning portrayal of Mahatma Gandhi, Sir Ben Kingsley is to return to India to make a film based on the romance that inspired the building of the Taj Mahal, India’s iconic monument to love and loss.
He will play the grief-stricken Mughal emperor Shah Jehan who commissioned the Taj as a monument to his dead wife Mumtaz, ordering that it should be a mausoleum “as beautiful as she was beautiful”.
The role of Mumtaz has fallen to Aishwarya Rai, the pearl-skinned Bollywood actress once described by fellow actress Julia Roberts as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.
Sir Ben told the Times of India: “I had spoken to Aishwarya last year while we were working on The Last Legion [a Hollywood epic on the Roman empire] and she very generously agreed to do the movie.”
Shooting is due to begin next year in Agra, where the Taj Mahal stands on the banks of the Yamuna river, and Fatehpur Sikri, the abandoned city built by Akbar the Great almost a century earlier.
The film is expected to cover the death of Queen Mumtaz while giving birth to her 14th child, the construction of the Taj – completed in 1654 after 20 years’ work by 20,000 masons – and Shah Jehan’s subsequent imprisonment by his son in the Agra Fort.
Telegraph
|
