Ray Winstone
Raymond Andrew Winstone is an
English actor, born on
February 19 1957 in
Hackney,
London.
Winstone's family was originally from
Cirencester - half of them shifting to
London, the other half to
Wales. Moving via
Plaistow to
Enfield when Winstone was 7, his father (also Raymond) ran a fruit and vegetable business (he's now a
black cab driver) while his mother, Margaret, had a job emptying
fruit machines. Winstone recalls playing with his friends on bomb sites until "
Moors Murderers"
Ian Brady and
Myra Hindley were arrested after preying on children. Winstone was educated at Edmonton County, which had changed from a Grammar School to a Comprehensive upon his arrival. He didn't take to school, eventually leaving with a single CSE (Grade 2) in
Drama.
Winstone had an early affinity for acting; his father would take him to the cinema every Wednesday afternoon, and Winstone later recalled seeing
101 Dalmatians and rushing towards the screen to berate
Cruella de Vil. Later, he would witness
Albert Finney in
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and the bug would bite: "I thought 'I could be that geezer'" he said later. Other major influences included
John Wayne,
James Cagney and
Edward G. Robinson. After borrowing extra
tuition money from a friend's mother, a drama teacher, he took to the stage, appearing as a
Cockney newspaper-seller in a production of
Emile And The Detectives.
Winstone was also a fan of
boxing. Known to his friends as Winnie, at home he was called Little Sugs (his dad already being known as Sugar - after
Sugar Ray Robinson). At age 12, Winstone joined the famous Repton Amateur boxing Club and, over the next 10 years, won 80 out of 88 bouts. At
welterweight, he was London Schoolboy Champion of three occasions, fighting twice for England. The experience gave him a perspective on his later career: "If you can get in a ring with 2000 people watching and be smacked around by another guy, then walking onstage isn't hard."
Deciding to pursue drama, Winstone enrolled at the Corona School in
Hammersmith. At £900 a term, it was expensive, considering the average wage was some £36 a week. At the time, he was a
skinhead, into
ska and tonic suits. Once he turned up to
ballet class in a leotard and bovver boots, and once he got a zero on an exam for reciting passages from
Julius Caesar in ripe Cockney.
He landed his first major role in
What A Crazy World at
Theatre Royal Stratford East, but he danced and sang badly, leading his usually-supportive father to say "Give it up, while you're ahead." One of his first T.V. appearances came in the 1976 "Loving Arms" episode of the popular police series
The Sweeney where he was credited as "Raymond Winstone" and played a minor part as an unnamed young thug.
Winstone was not popular with the school establishment, who considered him a bad influence. After some 12 months, he found that he was the only pupil not invited to the
Christmas party and decided to take
revenge for this slight. Hammering some tacks through a piece of wood, he placed it under the wheel of his headmistress's car and blew out the tire. For this, he was expelled. As a joke, he went up to the
BBC, where his schoolmates were involved in an audition, and got one of his own by flirting with the secretary. The audition was for one of the most notorious plays in history -
Alan Clarke's
Scum - and, because Clarke liked Winstone's cocky, aggressive boxer's walk, he got the part, even though it had been written for a
Glaswegian. The play, written by
Roy Minton and directed by Clarke, was a brutal depiction of a young offenders institution. Winstone was cast in the leading role of Carlin, a young offender who struggles against both his captors and his fellow cons in order to become the "Daddy" of the institution. Hard hitting and often violent (particularly during the infamous "billiards" scene in which Carlin uses two billiard balls stuffed in a sock in order to beat one of his fellow inmates over the head) the play was judged unsuitable for broadcast by the BBC, and was not finally shown until
1991. The banned television play was entirely re-filmed in
1979 for cinematic release with many of the original actors playing the same roles. In a recent director's commentary for the
Scum DVD, Winstone cites Clarke as a major influence on his career, and laments the director's death in
1991 from
cancer.
Winstone's role in
Scum seems to have set a mould for many of his other parts; he is frequently cast as a tough or violent man. He has also been cast against type, however, in films in which he reveals a softer side. He had a comedic part in
Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence, and played the romantic lead in
Fanny and Elvis. His favourite role was in the television
biopic on the life of England's most notorious monarch, King
Henry VIII.
Helena Bonham Carter co-starred as Henry's most well-known queen,
Anne Boleyn.
Emilia Fox played
Jane Seymour,
Charles Dance played the Duke of Buckingham,
Emily Blunt played
Catherine Howard and
David Suchet played
Cardinal Wolsey.
Joss Ackland and
Sean Bean also starred.
After a short run in the TV series
Fox, and a role in
All Washed Up (alongside
Diane Lane,
Laura Dern and a host of real-life punks like
Fee Waybill,
Steve Jones,
Paul Cook and
Paul Simonon), Winstone got another big break, being cast as
Will Scarlet in
Robin Of Sherwood. He proved immensely popular and enjoyed the role, considering Scarlet to be "the first football hooligan" - though he was not fond of the
dubbed German version, in which he said he sounded like a "
psychotic mincer." But once the show was over, the parts dried up. He got involved in co-producing
Tank Malling, starring Jason Connery,
Amanda Donohoe and Maria Whittaker, and scored a few TV parts. Over the years, he's appeared in TV shows including
The Sweeney,
The Bill,
Boon,
Fairly Secret Army (as Stubby Collins),
Ever Decreasing Circles,
Murder Most Horrid,
Birds of a Feather,
Minder,
Kavanagh QC,
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and
Get Back (with the fledgling
Kate Winslet.) During this period, he was increasingly drawn to the theatre, playing in
Hinkemann in 1988,
Some Voices in 1994 and
Dealer's Choice and
Pale Horse the following year.
Winstone was asked to appear in
Mr Thomas, a play written by his friend and fellow-Londoner
Kathy Burke. The reviews were good, and led to Winstone being cast, alongside Burke, in
Gary Oldman's drama
Nil By Mouth. As a
cocaine-fuelled wife-batterer, he was lauded across the board, receiving a
BAFTA nomination (17 years after his Best Newcomer award for
That Summer). He continued to play tough guy roles in the likes of
Face and
The War Zone — the latter especially controversial, as he played a father who
rapes his teenage daughter — but that obvious toughness would also allow him to play decent men softened by love in romantic comedies like
Fanny And Elvis and
There's Only One Jimmy Grimble. In
Last Christmas, he played a dead father, now a trainee
angel, who returns from
Heaven to help his young son cope with his bereavement, written by
Tony Grounds who Ray worked with again on 'Births Marriages & Deaths' and 'Our Boy' winning Ray the Royal Televison Society Best Actor Award. They worked together again in 2006 on 'All in the Game' where Ray gives a virtuoso performance as a football manager. He did a series of Pils ads where he played upon the phrase "Who's the Daddy," coined in the film
Scum.
After a brief role alongside Burke again in the tragi-comic
The Martins, he appeared in
Last Orders, directed by
Fred Schepisi (of
Roxanne fame), where he starred alongside the weighty likes of
Michael Caine,
Helen Mirren,
David Hemmings and
Tom Courtney. Before shooting began, he was fearful that meeting these actor-heroes (he loved the likes of
Zulu and
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner) might turn out to be disappointing. He later said his co-stars were as impressive as he'd hoped, however.
Next Winstone would nab a prime part in
Ripley's Game, the
sequel to
The Talented Mr. Ripley, in which he once again played a cold-bloodedly violent gangster. He followed up with
Lenny Blue, the sequel to
Tough Love, and the short
The Bouncer.
In
2000, he starred in
To The Green Fields Beyond at the
Donmar Warehouse (directed by
Sam Mendes, the man behind
American Beauty). 2002 would see him at the Royal Court, as Griffin in
The Night Heron. Two years later, he joined
Kevin Spacey for
24 Hour Plays at the
Old Vic, a series of productions that were written, rehearsed and performed in a single day. Now internationally known, Winstone was next chosen by
Anthony Minghella to play Teague, a sinister Home Guard boss, in the
Civil War drama
Cold Mountain.
Perhaps inspired by Burke and Oldman, Winstone has now decided to direct and produce his own movies, setting up Size 9 and Flicks production companies with his long-time agent
Michael Wiggs. The first effort was
She's Gone, in which he plays a businessman whose young daughter disappears in
Istanbul (filming was held up by unrest in the
Middle East.) He followed it up with
Jerusalem in which he played poet and visionary
William Blake.
Winstone made his action movie debut in
King Arthur, starring
Clive Owen, directed by
Antoine Fuqua, and produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer. In that film, Fuqua proclaimed him as "the British
De Niro." He then provided the voice of Soldier Sam in the long-awaited screen version of
The Magic Roundabout.
In
2005, he appeared opposite
Suranne Jones in
ITV drama
Vincent about a team of private detectives and a 19th century English policeman trying to tame the Australian outback in
The Proposition.
Winstone is set to appear in 2006's crime thriller
The Departed as Mr. French, an enforcer to
Jack Nicholson's Boston mob boss.
Winstone met his wife, Elaine, while filming
That Summer in 1979. They have three daughters and his two eldest Lois and
Jamie are both actors. Winstone was
bankrupted by the Inland Revenue before his marriage, and again soon afterwards, but his near-religious refusal to worry saw him through, as it would his occasional run-ins with the police. While returning from filming an episode of
Bergerac on
Jersey, he was stopped on suspicion of gun-running. And, a couple of years after that, he spent 72 hours in a
Leeds jail cell, having been "identified" by a member of the public who'd seen an identikit picture of a criminal on
Crimewatch UK.
Winstone lives with his wife in
Roydon, Essex, still supports
West Ham United, and keeps up the physical training, being a regular at
Ricky English's gym in Watford. He is a huge fan of crooners, as well as
Motown,
Al Green,
Sam Cooke,
Marvin Gaye,
Paul Weller,
Madness, and
Ian Dury.
Beowulf (2007)
The Departed (2006)
Sweeney Todd (2006)
Vincent (2005)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) (voice)
The Magic Roundabout (2005) (voice)
The Proposition (2005)
King Arthur (2004)
Cold Mountain (2003)
Henry VIII (2003) (TV series)
Ripley's Game (2002)
Love, Honour and Obey (2000)
Sexy Beast (2000)
There's only one Jimmy Grimble (1999)
Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence (1998)
Face (1997)
Nil by Mouth (1997)
Robin of Sherwood (1984) (TV series)
Quadrophenia (1979)
Scum (1979)
The Sweeney (1976) (TV series - 1 minor role)
*
Three-page biography from Tiscali Film & TV*
Ray Winstone fan site*
BBC Drama Faces - Ray Winstone
