The film Ray Winstone called a masterpiece: “The heart just got to me”
Being completely incapable of mastering any accent other than his own to a degree that’s even remotely convincing has hardly hampered Ray Winstone from embarking on what might just be – no offence intended to Idris Elba – the greatest career of any actor born in Hackney.
It’s been 45 years since he broke out in a big way with a ferocious central performance in Alan Clarke’s unflinching Scum, which could have easily seen him typecast forevermore as a bruising heavy. While he’s played plenty of those characters in his time, they’ve hardly defined Winstone as a performer.
Along the way, he’s worked with many of the industry’s greatest directors and touched base with almost every genre available, whether it’s anchoring Jonathan Glazer’s blackly comic crime thriller Sexy Beast, sparring with Harrison Ford in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, or being reinvented as a jacked action hero in Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf.
Anthony Minghella, John Hillcoat, and Darren Aronofsky are another selection of the esteemed filmmakers he’s collaborated with over the years, but it would have been a bucket list item for Winstone to get the opportunity to work with Martin Scorsese not just once but twice.
As well as lending support as Frenchie in the ‘Best Picture’-winning The Departed, the actor reunited with the living legend under entirely different circumstances when he played Uncle Claude in the lavish adventure Hugo. There’s barely a well-known thespian in the industry who doesn’t hold Scorsese in the highest regard, with Winstone waxing lyrical to Rotten Tomatoes on the majesty of Raging Bull.
Calling it “a masterpiece of movie-making”, the star’s appreciation of the biographical drama has just as much to do with its technical artistry and touching narrative as it does the brutal bouts of pugilism that appeal directly to his previous proclivities.
“I love it because, when you cut the boxing out, it’s about people,” he explained. “It’s beautifully shot. The slow-motion stuff, the music, the characters, the acting, the direction. It’s classic to me because I’ve been a boxer, and it emotionally touches me. The heart just got to me.” Winstone even watched it with a friend of his who happens to be a boxer, “and we were both crying at the end of the movie which sounds ridiculous, but it got to us, you know?”
As one of the greatest films ever made, everybody to have seen Raging Bull knows exactly what Winstone is talking about, with Robert De Niro’s incendiary performance as Jake LaMotta just one small – but iconic – aspect of the film’s enduring legacy. He got the opportunity to sit under Scorsese’s learning tree twice, and it stands to reason he may have fanboyed just a little bit.