Actors - Ray Winstone

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	Actors - 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 in that area. 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 Dalmations 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 Ceasar 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 famous "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.

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