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Diamond geezer
He’s the original battered bruiser, the East End boxer who became a Hollywood star. But as Garth Pearce found, Ray Winstone is a hard guy with a soft centre
Ray Winstone has a face that looks as if it has taken a punch too many; but it’s taken him all the way to the top in Hollywood. It hasn’t been easy – Cockney accents have not always been fashionable. Even when the former schoolboy boxing champion made his screen debut as a villain in The Sweeney it was a non-speaking part. Later came the role of Will Scarlet in a TV series of Robin of Sherwood, but few gave the actor much hope of the big time.
But times changed and at 51, Winstone is at the top of his game. Those looks, attitude and voice have propelled him, little by little, to stardom and he’s now one of the film world’s best-known ‘geezers’. This month see him as Harrison Ford’s sidekick in the new Indiana Jones film, a job that brought him the biggest pay cheque of his career.
It is the culmination of a run of recent successes. As well as being an unlikely Henry VIII in a television series, he was the lead in the hit film Beowulf. But the real turning point came eight years ago with Sexy Beast, in which Winstone played the ex-criminal Gary “Gal” Dove, who was forced back from his Spanish hideaway to a “job” in London by a vile hitman, played by Ben Kingsley.
Winstone is as surprised as anyone that his face has become his fortune. “It’s more of a boozer’s face than a schmoozer’s,” he jokes. It has allowed him to play the hard man with conviction. He can make a simple, softly whispered sentence sound like a threat. He looks like the sort of bloke you would not fancy taking on in a brawl. But looks are deceptive, he says. In truth, he’s a softy.
“An image has built up,” he agrees. “I’ve been happy to go along with it. Sure, a lot of actors would not, or could not, play the kind of roles that come my way. But you can’t be an actor of any kind by just being tough. I am sensitive, a family man, a proud dad to three daughters and am lucky to be able to express different emotions on screen.” It does not take long in Winstone’s company to realise there is more to him than meets the eye. He was born in Hackney, London, the son of a cabbie, and had an early lesson in how often life is not what it seems.
“Where I came from there was a lot of ducking and diving,” he says. “It wasn’t thieving, just a way of life. When I was about 18, I remember seeing a fella and girl in a car park and he was smashing the life out of her. I jumped on this guy, pulled him off and said: ‘What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to kill her.’ The girl turns around and punches me straight in the head. She said: ‘Mind your own business.’ I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I left them together, getting on as sweet as a nut. That’s when I learnt how complicated life can be.”
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