Ray Winstone: The thug, the lover and the actor
He started out as pure scum and went on to become a national treasure by playing wifebeaters, child abusers, gangsters, bank robbers, loan sharks and second-hand car dealers. Famous for tackling the whole range from rough diamond to plain rough, Ray Winstone has now, at 49, received the recognition he deserves. At the International Emmy Awards in New York he was named Best Actor for his role as a private investigator in the ITV drama series Vincent. The awards recognise international TV excluding US programmes.
Growing up in Hackney and Enfield, Winstone’s family had a fruit-and-vegetable stall. A three-time London schoolboy boxing champion, he boxed for England before trying acting. He was thrown out of drama school after putting nails under the tyres of a car belonging to a teacher with whom he had a grievance.
His first success was as a teenage thug in the borstal drama Scum. “He was pretty wild in those days but he has always managed to do great work,” Don Boyd, who produced the film, has recalled. “There are a lot of contradictions: the Cockney lad made good who is also immensely clever and well-read. He has this image of being the hard man but he is the most adorable sentimentalist.”
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After Scum he was in Quadrophenia but his real blooming has come relatively late, with acclaim for such parts as the retired crook Gal in Sexy Beast and a wifebeater opposite Kathy Burke in Nil By Mouth, for which he was nominated for a Bafta. His air of menace has served him well in numerous roles. Currently, he can be seen as one of Jack Nicholson’s henchmen in Martin Scorsese’s mob movie The Departed. But he has also been Henry VIII, Beowulf and Mr Beaver in The Chronicles of Narnia.
“I love being a thug, but I like being a lover, too,” he has said. “I like playing men who have got that little bit of feminine side about them. I can throw a table through a window like anyone else, but I do like the emotional side of things.” His acting is deliberately understated and in the past this has occasionally brought him into conflict with directors who have wanted more of a performance. “A really top director once kept me in a room and said:
‘If only you could really concentrate we could...’ And I just looked at him. We could what? He didn’t have a clue about me or where I was coming from. Not performing? Not performing is the whole point.”
He struggled financially in his early career and was twice on the brink of bankruptcy. Home now is a farmhouse in Essex. He has been married to Elaine for more than a quarter of a century and they have three children; two daughters in their early twenties and a planned later addition, five-year-old Ellie. “I am a husband and father first,” he says. “Acting comes after that.”