by Ray Winstone
Although I appreciated my dad coming to watch me, I always thought I boxed better when he wasn’t there. He used to get rather excited, and I suppose I was more worried about what my dad was thinking than I was about what I was doing. I bear that in mind with my eldest girl Lois these days. She’s a singer and I really like what she does, but I don’t go to every gig – even though she wants me to – because I like her not to have to worry about what I’m thinking of it.
I had a particular way of being nervous before a fight, which is still how I get to this day when I’m doing a film. Some people would be physically sick with nerves, but I’d get very tired and start falling asleep instead. I’d try to keep myself going but I’d just feel really lethargic – I think it was the loss of all the energy my nerves were burning. I’d get a kind of fear as well. Not a fear of being punched – well, I suppose there might have been a bit of that – but more a general anxiety about not doing what you’re supposed to do, just forgetting it all. That’s how I’d feel until the bell went at the start of the first round, then I’d wake up – like the drunk guy in the pub who springs to attention when he hears ‘last orders’.
I’m more or less the same on a film set, even now. There’s always that fear in the time leading up to it. You’re thinking, ‘Why couldn’t I have done this yesterday when I was feeling great, instead of today when I’ve got no energy and can’t remember the words? What are the fucking words again?’ Then someone shouts ‘Action!’ and nine times out of ten – thank God – it’s alright. You work the scene out because you’ve got a fine actor opposite you, the timing’s working and bam! some energy floods into you.
That’s why I say boxing was probably more of an education for me as an actor than stage school was (apart from the ballet, obviously – that was an essential). Because without the boxing I wouldn’t have known what that feeling is where you step through the ropes into the ring thinking, ‘Why am I putting myself through this shit?’ Whether you’re climbing into the ring or walking onstage there’s no fundamental difference, what matters is what you do next.
I remember the first senior fight I had at the age of seventeen. It was at Alan Minter’s club in Crawley, and I’ve got to tell you that when I was seventeen, you’d have looked at me and guessed I was at least fucking twelve. I was reasonably tall – five foot nine or ten – but I looked like I should still be in shorts and plastic sandals. I think I’ve said before that when you get in the ring you have a little look in the guy’s eyes opposite and you know whether you’re going to win or not. This time, when the other geezer took his gown off, he was covered in tattoos (and this was when having a tattoo still meant something) and hairy as a fucking gorilla. I don’t know what they’re putting in the water down Crawley way. He was meant to be my age but he looked about thirty-five.
All of a sudden you’re not boxing boys any more, you’re boxing men. It’s like moving up from borstal into prison. I mean, the geezer had hairy legs – I’d never had a hair on my legs in my life! At this point you either decide you’ve got no chance and give up, or you approach it like a chess match and try to find a way to win. The first round I went with plan A and I was just totally overwhelmed. But then I went back in my corner and thought, ‘Fuck this!’ The second round I started boxing differently and it was much more even. Then I pissed the third round and won the fight.
That discipline of standing there thinking, ‘I can’t do this’, and then taking a deep breath and giving it a go really stands you in good stead for the rest of your life. It’s not just a matter of digging deep inside yourself, you’ve also got to clear your mind. The way you calm yourself down and convince yourself that nothing’s impossible is almost like meditation – that’s what gives you the confidence to keep yourself out of harm’s way. If you do it right, you can almost get a feeling that the other geezer can’t hurt you (even though obviously they can). It’s funny with pain, I find I’ve got a way of switching it off. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, because sometimes pain is there for a reason.
It’s the same with a script where there’s something dark or difficult that’s going to happen. You’ve got to close that down a bit so you can go beyond it. And the fear you have when you first pick it up and maybe think you can’t do it is the thing which is going to help you do that. It’s the equivalent of Jackie Bowers in my corner when I was boxing a kid called Terry Parker at the London Feds Finals. I came back at the end of the first round and got beaten up worse than I had been in the ring. Jackie’s slapping me round the head going, ‘C’mon, liven up’, and I’m thinking, ‘Fuck that, I’d rather be out there boxing than in here fighting him.’
Once you’re out there, that’s when the ringcraft comes in – the stuff that Billy Howick taught me at the Repton. It’s all about the positioning of your feet and where you move – all the little tricks of pushing someone’s arms down to get them off balance and then getting a jab in. A lot of it is kind of on the borderline of being illegal, but there are ways of being illegal which are still within the spirit of the game. And so long as the head coach Burnsy’s matched you up not to get hurt, like he always does, hopefully you’ll keep the old face intact.
CHAPTER 15
THE PROSPECT OF WHITBY, WAPPING
It was partly going to Corona that pushed boxing into the wings. But the gloves were also coming off as far as drinking was concerned, and they were already long gone when it came to girls. I didn’t give the boxing up for good. I would put the gloves back on and return to the ring for two more fights a couple of years later, but that would be my Elvis in Vegas phase.
In the meantime, the discipline I’d learnt at the Repton helped keep me out of some of the scrapes I’d probably have got into otherwise, but not all of them. One incident which has stuck in my mind, for reasons which will soon become obvious, was when I went away for a few days with a mate from drama college called John Walford. His mum lived with a French Basque geezer in Andorra, this strange little tax haven in the Spanish Alps who are one of the few teams England can usually be expected to beat in the World Cup.
Now, the Spanish and the French Basques don’t tend to get on with one another particularly well, but I wasn’t too bothered about all that. I was too busy sliding around the place in all this moody ski gear – basically a pair of jeans and a woolly hat. One night we went to a club that was up on the top of this mountain. It was full of Spanish and French, not mixing particularly well. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and you can just smell the trouble that’s coming? This was one of those.
The French fella we were with was some kind of karate expert, and when it all eventually went off he started really putting himself about, karate-chopping everyone. If I’d had a choice I probably wouldn’t have been on his side, but I didn’t have a choice because all these Spanish geezers attacked us. In that kind of mass tear-up you basically just end up hitting anyone who’s near you who you didn’t come in with. We’re dishing out a few good clumps, but we’re taking some as well.
What you don’t want in that situation is for someone to take things up a level, and John’s mum’s boyfriend pulling out a gas gun and shooting the geezer next to him in the chest with a flare was never really going to calm things down too much. The other guy went up like a human torch. Although he was alright in the end because everyone jumped on him to put the fire out, I had to get John’s mum and throw her under the table to keep her out of the free-for-all that followed. At this point, the Old Bill – or the Vieux Guillaume as the French call them – arrived, and whatever language we were speaking, this was definitely a ‘stoppo’.
We all sprinted out the side door, Johnny’s mum and the French fella jumped in one car, and me and Johnny got in his little motor which we’d been running around in, and now we’re bombing down the mountain. It’s about one o’clock in the morning and we’re both quite bruised up after taking a few good clumps (as well as having had a fair bit to drink). John sees a bend coming up and puts hi
s foot down hard on the brake – never the best idea when you’re driving on black ice. As the car starts to spin, I’m looking out of the window and it’s a good thousand feet down the side of the mountain. I’m not exaggerating – the Pyrenees are high. I’m thinking, ‘This is it, I’m gonna die.’
The car spun and it spun and all I could see was down. There was no panic – just a total feeling of calm and knowing there was nothing we could do about it. Then we smashed into a wall and came to a dead stop. It was a bit too much like the end of The Italian Job for comfort.
We sat there for a minute in silence, probably shaking a bit and just getting used to the fact that we were still alive. Then we started to think, ‘What are we gonna do now?’ The car was a write-off and no one who came past seemed that into stopping, so we had no choice but to walk down the mountain. It took us about an hour, and when we finally got to the town we went into this little place and ordered some strawberries and cream and a bottle of champagne. It was almost like ‘this is the first day of the rest of the life which just nearly ended’.
Brushes with death notwithstanding, I was primed for going abroad by then. I love going to places I’ve never been to before, and the great thing about the kind of travelling I do now in the film industry is that you don’t necessarily go to the same places as normal tourists do. You’ll end up in the parts of a country where people actually live. I suppose my lucky escape in Andorra was a foretaste of things to come in that area. These days I try to get into and out of a place without participating in a mass brawl like you’d get in an old-fashioned Western, although I was fine with that back then. I didn’t know who or what I was meant to be fighting for, I was just hitting everybody who came near me. I was a mercenary doing it for love – Margaret Thatcher’s son Mark had nothing on me.
John Walford changed his surname to Segal later on and became quite a successful actor for a while. There was a David Niven-ish quality about him that the birds liked (and he liked them back), almost a gentleman-fraudster kind of thing. His mum was a survivor as well. She was still a good-looking woman and it turned out she knew the chief of police in the town, so the whole flare-gun thing got nicely smoothed over and I managed to get home to Blighty without having to bring the consulate into it.
Obviously not everyone who went to Corona got the chance to have a career as a professional actor when they left – in fact, if you did you were kind of the exception that proved the rule. Even my old Zoo Story sparring partner David Morris never really got a break, which was a shame because he was good enough to make it – he really was.
What tended to happen was that you might get a few little chances as an extra or in small speaking parts and whether or not anything came of it was kind of in the lap of the gods. I could tell you that I was grateful for any opportunities that came my way and did my best to grasp them with both hands in an appropriately appreciative and professional manner, but that would be a complete load of bollocks.
Truth be told, I was a bit of a handful at this stage in my life. I’d found it quite easy to adjust to the kind of discipline boxing required, but knowing how to behave at casting calls was a completely different matter. I wasn’t used to people treating me like a piece of shit in normal life, and I wasn’t ambitious enough to accept it in the interests of getting a part.
The first audition I ever turned up for was in Reading, and I was late ’cos I had to get the train and I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was for something called The Perils of Pauline. I’m not sure if it ever even came out because the most recent film with that title which I could find on the internet was made in America in 1967. Anyway, I finally got in there and the casting woman really had the hump. I said, ‘I’m really sorry, I got lost. I’ve never done this before.’ She was really short with me and just sort of hissed at me, ‘Sit down, you’re not in this scene.’
I remember thinking, ‘I ain’t gonna like this much if that’s the way they’re gonna talk to me.’ But the scene they were filming at the time was some kind of basketball game, and at that point someone blew a whistle and all the girls took their tops off. Turned out it was one of those things they made a lot of in the mid-seventies that are a bit raunchy but not quite raunchy enough to be soft porn. Either way, there were threepennies everywhere, and even though I didn’t get the part, I did get the train back to London thinking, ‘Maybe there’s something to this acting game after all.’
Not long afterwards, I went up for a part in the Ken Russell film Lisztomania. We all had to stand in a row and this woman with blue hair came down the line with the great man. It was for a little Hitler scene where you had to have your hair cut like der Führer (Adolf, not Ken), so she was going down the line kind of barking at us: ‘You, get your hair cut. You, get your hair cut . . .’ She wasn’t even looking at us properly as she was saying it, and it seemed like she was channelling the spirit of the Nazis a little bit too effectively.
So when she got to me, I just told her: ‘I don’t want my hair cut.’ When she told me I’d have to if I wanted the part, I asked her how much extra you got paid for having your hair cut and she said, ‘Nothing.’ Then she asked me if I even wanted to be in the film and I said, ‘No, because I don’t want to fucking look like you.’ Part or no part, I wasn’t having someone treating me so disrespectfully. And I didn’t regret standing up to her, even when I found out she was Ken Russell’s wife.
It would be wrong to characterise this as an isolated incident. There was another time when I got sent up for some work as an extra in Get Some In. It was an ITV sitcom about National Service which my mate Karl Howman – who I’m going to tell you about in a minute – ended up starring in. He hadn’t got there yet, though; I think Robert Lindsay was doing it at the time, maybe before he did Citizen Smith. Anyway, all of us extras were standing there in our RAF bits while the actors did their piece. And instead of just asking me to move, the director kind of picked me up and moved me by my shoulder.
I was a skinny little thing in those days, so he probably thought it would be OK. But it wasn’t, because I turned round and nutted him. He went sprawling over the chairs and I was obviously asked to leave the premises in no uncertain terms. At that point I was looking around to see if anyone else wanted to have a fight, but no one did, so I was out of there.
After that, Corona became a bit reticent to send me up for things, which I suppose I couldn’t really blame them for, as I was a bit of a little fucker and I probably wasn’t doing the school’s reputation any good either. Maybe I just wasn’t quite ready for the film industry, or the film industry wasn’t quite ready for me. Either way, to be honest, I’m still a bit the same today. Ask me nicely and I’ll do anything for you, but if you’re trying to mug me off, sitting in the director’s chair (or next to it) won’t get you a free pass.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t willing to learn. I got a part-time job as the token straight man with all the lesbians and gays in the wardrobe department at the National Theatre for a while, when it was still at the Old Vic. You’d get £28 a night or something like that, which wasn’t bad compared to what the Theatre Royal Stratford East was paying (and there was the added bonus that you didn’t have to give any of it to Vanessa Redgrave). The three plays they were doing at the time – because they revolved them at the National even then – were Playboy of the Western World, Hamlet and another one. My job was looking after two actors called Patrick Monckton and Michael Keating, but sometimes a mate of mine (John Walford/Segal again) who was looking after Albert Finney would be off and I’d have to stand in for him.
Finney had been one of my favourite actors ever since I’d seen him in Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. It didn’t matter that he was playing a Northerner – I recognised that character, and that was the first time I’d ever seen the kind of person I could relate to from my own life up there on the big screen in such a convincing way. I used to love watching him in Hamlet, giving it the full Shakespearian thing, but doing it as a man, so I’d go missing during
the play to watch him from the seats right upstairs at the back.
Unfortunately I was late getting back once and Albert missed his cue. As I went running round the back to help him, Susan Fleetwood came off the stage after the mad scene. I think she’d got a bit carried away during that one because she picked up my hand and placed it firmly on her left tit saying, ‘Feel my heart.’ I said, ‘It’s not your heart I’m feeling, Susan.’
I went in the bar afterwards knowing I’d fucked up, which I felt really bad about, as I had a lot of time for Albert Finney as a person, never mind how great his acting was. I still wasn’t quite ready to face the music, though, so when he came in looking for me, I ducked down behind a table. Through the forest of furniture legs I could clearly see Albert’s human ones walking across the floor, so I crawled off between the stools in the opposite direction.
When I came up for air, there he was standing right in front of me, like one of the twins in The Shining, only with Albert Finney’s face. I don’t know how he did it; it was like he floated there or something. His first two words were not promising – they were ‘You’ and ‘cunt’ – but when I explained, ‘Albert, I’m so sorry I fucked up, I was watching you from up the back and I just missed the call’, it seemed to do the trick. All he said after that was, ‘What do you want to drink?’
Even though I was only in the wardrobe department, I was quite proud of the fact that I was part of the company for the crossover from the Old Vic to the new building on the South Bank, which might have been a bit of a concrete block but it had great theatres inside it. Being out and about doing that was much better than just being stuck in Corona doing little plays. Not only did the wages help pay my tube fare into college in the mornings, I was also getting paid to watch the kind of actors I admired go to work at close quarters. It wasn’t just Albert Finney, there were Angela Lansbury, Frank Finlay and Dinsdale Landen as well; all of whom were great technicians, far beyond any level that I could ever aspire to.