 Ray Winstone made an explosive acting debut, then took his sweet time - a
good two decades, in fact - to realise his full potential. Specialising in hard
men with intriguing chinks in their armour, he neatly side-stepped narrow
typecasting even at the height of the London crime movie boom, proving equally
at home in historical drama, American blockbusters and rough British realist
grit.
He was born on 19 February 1957 in Hackney, East London, the son of a
fruit-and-veg market trader. While still at school, he was a boxing champion who
competed twice for England as a welterweight, then became interested in acting.
He left school with one CSE, in drama, and in 1974 enrolled in the Corona Stage
Academy in Hammersmith, but was expelled after a year for vandalising the
headteacher's car.
His first key appearance was in the 1977 BBC play Scum as a violent borstal
boy; the BBC refused to broadcast it until 1991, but Winstone was cast in the
same role when the director, Alan Clarke, remade Scum for the cinema two years
later. Also in 1979, he appeared in the mods-and-rockers drama, Quadrophenia (d.
Franc Roddam), and in a gentle coming-of-age tale, That Summer (d. Harley
Cokeliss), for which he received a BAFTA nomination for Best Newcomer. He met
his wife, Elaine, on that film's Torquay shoot; the two eldest of their three
daughters, Lois and Jaime, are also actresses.
He played Will Scarlet in 24 episodes of Robin of Sherwood (ITV, 1984-86),
but the next years were difficult professionally and personally (he went
bankrupt twice). He took minor jobs on television, and worked in the theatre,
most successfully in Mr Thomas (1990), written by his friend, the actress Kathy
Burke.
His career took off in the late 1990s. He made a brilliant impression as a
brutal, alcoholic, yet disturbingly appealing wife-beater in Nil By Mouth
(1997), the actor Gary Oldman's lacerating debut as director. He displayed a
lighter side in two poorly received romantic comedies, Martha, Meet Frank,
Daniel and Laurence (d. Nick Hamm, 1998) and Fanny and Elvis (d. Kay Mellor,
1999). But he really began to spread his wings with a wide range of charismatic
villains: a small-time bank robber in Face (d. Antonia Bird, 1997), a man who
rapes his teenage daughter in The War Zone (d. Tim Roth, 1999), a loan shark in
Agnes Browne (d. Anjelica Huston, 1999), a boorish salesman in the black-comic
Births, Marriages and Deaths (BBC, 1999), a gang boss in Love, Honour and Obey
(d. Dominic Anciano/Ray Burdis, 2000) and, in what was to become another
signature role, a retired safecracker baking in the sun on the Costa del Crime
in Sexy Beast (d. Jonathan Glazer, 2000). Other characters included Michael
Caine's dodgy car-dealing son in Last Orders (d. Fred Schepesi, 2001) and a
shady ex-pat in Berlin in Ripley's Game (d. Liliana Cavani, 2002).
A turn as a boorish Henry VIII (ITV, tx. 12/10/2003) ushered in a suite of
period dramas and escalating interest from A-list directors. He was a vigilante
in the American Civil War in Cold Mountain (d. Anthony Minghella, 2003), a
knight in King Arthur (d. Antoine Fuqua, 2004), a lawman in 19th century
Australia in The Proposition (d. John Hillcoat, 2005), the demon barber in
Sweeney Todd (BBC, tx. 3/1/2006), the epic warrior in Robert Zemeckis's
performance-capture Beowulf (2007), a British adventurer in Indiana Jones and
the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (d. Steven Spielberg, 2008) and an ex-Boer War
guerrilla in New Zealand in Tracker (d. Ian Sharp, 2010).
In between, the busy actor set up two production companies, Flicks and Size 9
(the latter's credits include Sweeney Todd), and took on contemporary roles,
including a corrupt football manager in All in the Game (Channel 4, 2006), a
kindly detective in Breaking and Entering (d. Anthony Minghella, 2006), a Boston
mobster in The Departed (d. Martin Scorsese, 2006), a jealous, vindictive
husband in 44 Inch Chest (d. Malcolm Venville, 2009), Ian Dury's father in Sex
& Drugs & Rock & Roll (d. Mat Whitecross, 2010) and a shadowy fixer
in Edge of Darkness (d. Martin Campbell, 2010).
Sheila Johnston
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FILM & TV CREDITS
