Ray Winstone: The diamond geezer

Ray Winstone has a reputation for playing cockney tough-nuts. But the star of Sexy Beast and Nil by Mouth has plenty of other characters in him, he tells Brian Viner

Everybody says it. That 45-year-old Ray Winstone is not only, to use his own favourite adjective, a blinding actor, he is also a diamond geezer. And so it proves. We meet in the London media den, Soho House, where for an hour or more he natters cheerfully about his upbringing, his wife and three daughters, the World Cup (he was taken to see every England game during the 1966 tournament, including the final – "although funnily enough, I only remember it in black and white"), and his work, faltering only when he thinks he might be coming across as "a bit poncy". As if.

I first set eyes on Winstone when, aged 15 or so, my friends Billy Birtles, Rob Waggett and I managed to bluster our way into the ABC cinema in Southport to see the X-rated film Scum. Winstone played a vicious borstal boy called Carlin, whose weapon of choice was a sock filled with snooker balls. We did not see the film as a profound comment on the psychosis of violence, we were just impressed by how hard he was. We were at a boys school, where hardness counted for a lot. Tony Rodwell? Rock-hard. Mo Thabet? Rock- hard. But Carlin? In our adolescent minds, he became the ultimate personification of rock-hardness, and whenever I see Winstone on screen, it is an image I still find hard to shake.

In Soho House – cappuccino froth on my lips, which is not rock-hard at all – I am getting round to sharing these memories when Winstone says: "I've never been typecast. People say I play gangsters. When? Name 'em. I mean, I have done, but more than anything else I've played the guy next door." A pause. "Whatever the guy next door does."

In Nil By Mouth, the guy next door battered his wife. In The War Zone, the guy next door raped his daughter. But I take his point. Indeed, it is Winstone's ability to invest such characters with ordinariness that makes him such a fascinating performer. At the risk of inciting some "poncy" analysis of his acting style, I invite him to explain how he does it.

"I dunno. How do you research being a child-molester, a wife-basher? Do you go and do it? In Sexy Beast, Ben Kingsley played a really nasty gangster, and I thought 'hang on a minute, this is Gandhi'. But he said to me, 'This is part of me. There's a dark side within all of us.'"

This is about as poncy as Winstone gets. He offers no glimpses into his own dark side, although I do ask him, with Carlin still lurking menacingly at the back of my mind, what makes him really, really lose his rag. "Traffic," he says. "It took me two and a half hours to get here from Essex today. How much has that cost the country, with all them people late for work?"

Winstone looks genuinely exasperated. He turns the exasperation on me just once, when I ask him to tell me about his audition for the first Star Wars prequel, when director George Lucas appeared so indifferent that Winstone asked if he'd like to go away and have a short nap. "Oh, I've told that story a million times," he grumbles. "Let's talk about something new."

OK, does he have a middle name? Oddly enough, I've often found that this can be a fruitful line of enquiry. "It's Algernon," he says. Really? "Nah, it's Andrew. Raymond Andrew Winstone. My initials are RAW."

He was presciently named. He is an unusually raw, visceral actor, whose qualities can be enjoyed anew in next week's excellent two-part drama for ITV, Lenny Blue. It is a sequel to last year's Tough Love, in which Winstone plays a detective wrestling not just crime, but some destructive inner demons.

As Lenny, Winstone casts aside the familiar East End vowels and essays a Manchester accent. It is convincing enough, but slightly disorientating, so heaven knows what to expect when he stars as a Confederate officer in Cold Mountain, a forthcoming Anthony Minghella film set in the Deep South during the American Civil War, with Nicole Kidman and Jude Law. "Blinding," says Winstone, of the prospect.

He has always loved epic films. "My dad took me up the West End once a month. He had a fruit-and-veg business, so he'd work in the market all morning, then pick me up from school and take me to the pictures. We went locally, but the West End was Cinemascope, see. We saw Zulu there, Lawrence of Arabia, How the West was Won, 633 Squadron... and when the film finished, my dad would say, 'd'you want to see it again?', so we'd just stay where we were. One time, we went to see Jason and the Argonauts, and he fell asleep, so I sat through it again, and he woke up in the same place he fell asleep. When we got out it was dark. He went 'you bastard!'"

He chuckles. "I had a particular fascination with English actors. I loved Albert Finney. And when I was at college (the Corona Stage School in west London, from which he was eventually expelled for his disruptive influence, but fortunately was cast in Scum on the same day) I got a job in the wardrobe department at the National Theatre and dressed him for two weeks. Blinding man. I loved Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. And The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, with Tom Courtenay."

In Last Orders, the recent film version of Graham Swift's novel, Winstone found himself working with some of those childhood heroes, among them Courtenay, Michael Caine and David Hemmings. He was worried that they might not live up to his great expectations. "I thought, 'what if they all turn out to be wankers?'. But I loved them all to bits. I had all these little drinks, little talks, with Michael Caine. Blinding. And David Hemmings (with whom Winstone again teams up in Lenny Blue)? Great man. Don't take no shit. I love him."

Away from the pictures, Winstone's big childhood passion was sport. He was, and remains, a West Ham nut. And he was an amateur boxer, a light welterweight, good enough to represent England twice. He still walks with a boxer's rolling shoulders.

"My dad done it. My grandfather done it. I stopped when I was about 19. My last fight was in the Tate & Lyle factory in Silvertown. They had a gym upstairs. I won, but I couldn't get out of bed for a week. I was good at getting out the way. That's why I've got a straight nose still. I always concentrated on defence, because if they can't hit you and you hit them once, you've won. We had some world champions from our club. John H Stracey, he's still a mate. I love John. Maurice Hope. And Audley Harrison come from our club. I think he's all right, just needs to fight better opponents. Boxing's like acting; to improve you've got to be in classy company."

The danger of that tactic is that you can quickly look outclassed, out of your depth. Which might well happen to Harrison. But to Winstone? Not a chance.

'Lenny Blue' is on ITV 1 next Monday and Tuesday at 9pm