New Twist for Ben

Last updated at 12:21 26 April 2004


David Lean's landmark Oliver Twist movie, with Alec Guinness as Fagin, Robert Newton as Bill Sikes and John Howard Davies as Oliver, has become the benchmark for screen adaptations of Dickens's works.

Roman Polanski will roll his cameras on locations in Prague on June 21 to film the latest version of Oliver Twist.

He hopes to have Ben Kingsley as Fagin, Jamie Foreman as Sikes and newcomer Barney Clark, aged just ten, in the title part.

Deals with the actors have yet to be finalised. Even so, Polanski wants to show off his hoped-for cast in Paris on Monday morning.

Polanski viewed hundreds of video auditions before he selected Master Clark to be his Oliver.

The young lad's agents at the Anna Scher Management Agency have refused to confirm their client had landed the part, "as nothing has been signed yet".

Kingsley, or Sir Ben as he likes to be known, told me that he was looking forward to working with Polanski again (the pair worked on Death And The Maiden a decade ago).

The Oscar-winning actor, so brilliant in House Of Sand And Fog, plays the Hood, the 'baddie' in the Thunderbirds movie which opens soon.

You might be interested to know that Sam Smith, the best thing about the film Wondrous Oblivion (which opens this weekend), was in the TV mini-series of Oliver Twist four years ago.

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