Young Winstone

by Ray Winstone

  Looking back at that film now, I’m quite happy with the singing, and the bits where I beat up a couple of rock stars – Fee Waybill of The Tubes and a new-wave guy called Black Randy (who wasn’t actually black) – it’s the stuff in between that’s the problem. I was making progress, but the odd line is still a bit slow and some of my acting’s a bit naff.

  Diane Lane played the girl who ends up turning into a kind of prototype Lady Gaga in the film. She was only fifteen or sixteen at the time, but she ran rings round me, which worked well on screen as the story needed her to be fucking me over left, right and centre, anyway. I didn’t mind playing second fiddle to her because she was a tremendous actress then and she still is.

  The same is true of Laura Dern, who plays her sister in it. They were both a bit young to be in a film where there was an element of nudity involved, to be honest, and there was something a bit sleazy about the way it was being directed. Diane had her version of my dad’s ‘Give up while you’re in front’ moment at the premiere, when someone in her family asked her, ‘What about that film was worth your arse?’

  I kind of agreed with that verdict, to be honest. But after Paramount effectively shelved the movie for some complicated tax reason that I didn’t understand, its reputation started to grow, to the point where it’s now considered a ‘cult classic’ by a lot of people who haven’t actually seen it. The saying ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ is as true in the cinema as it is anywhere else. As my experiences with the first Scum and now Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains proved, sometimes the best thing that can happen to you as an actor is to be quite shit in a film and then have it not come out.

  Getting no work and having to receive secret food parcels off your mother-in-law is not quite such a good look. But that’s how things worked out for me in the first couple of years after Elaine and I got married. After the success of Scum and Quadrophenia I’d thought, ‘This acting lark’s a doddle.’ But once we got back from America, the phone suddenly stopped ringing.

  I probably didn’t do myself any favours by moving up north and buying a house in Stockport, but that was where Elaine’s family lived, and it’s important for a woman to be near her mother after she’s got married. Well, maybe not for all women, but certainly for this one.

  We’d tried living in London together for a while before we got married. My mum wouldn’t let Elaine stay overnight in Church Street until we were officially man and wife, so we moved out into a flat above a launderette in White Hart Lane. You didn’t need any heaters in the winter because of the warmth from the machines, but in the summer it was unbearable. I was trying to do the place up a bit to make it nicer for her, so I got my cousin Charlie-boy round to help. Let’s just say the two of us going into business together as handymen if and when the acting work dried up was probably not an option.

  Charlie was in between prison sentences at the time and he brought over this nail-gun he had to help me put up a curtain rail. We should’ve been drilling holes and putting rawlplugs in, but instead we were just nailing this fucking thing into the concrete walls. At one point the gun jammed, and he was bracing it against the floor to free it when it shot a nail down through the launderette’s ceiling. It was like a cartoon – this round hole appeared in the floor and we were stood above it doing a double take. Then we looked down through the hole and saw a woman sitting there with a laundry bag.

  We ran down the stairs and to the front of the shop to check she was alright. There was the woman sitting perfectly contentedly reading a magazine, and there was her laundry bag next to her – nailed to the fucking floor. It frightened the life out of us because that nail could’ve gone straight through her head.

  I was working on Fox at this time, so we were doing OK for money, but I was away on set a lot and probably not quite adjusted to the discipline of paying rent yet, so I must’ve missed the odd week here and there. One day, the big burly geezer who owned the launderette came round when I was out. He said, ‘Tell your Old Man to sort this out’, but Elaine ain’t telling me because she knows there’ll be murders. So, a few days later he comes back, and this time he’s really pushing his luck.

  While he’s popped into the shop downstairs, Elaine phones up my dad and says, ‘This fella keeps coming round.’ Within ten minutes he’s down the A10. All she’s heard is his car pull up and the next thing she knows my dad’s dragged the guy out of the launderette and is smashing his head against his car door. We lived there for another six months without paying rent after that, which seems a bit wrong of us in hindsight, but needs must when you’re young and making your way. And on Elaine’s part you’d probably have to classify this incident under ‘Welcome to the family’.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE CORNER OF WELL STREET AND MARE STREET

  Elaine and I had our wedding reception in the Belgrave Hotel in Reddish, near Stockport. Her family are Irish, and I was a bit worried about bringing the London mob, the Manchester mob and the Irish mob together. Especially as Mountbatten had just got blown up on his fishing boat. I remember thinking, ‘It’ll be just my luck if one of those that’ve come from over the water decides to make a joke about Lord Louis’ plimsolls floating past and the whole place goes up like a tinderbox.’

  Luckily, on the day it all went off surprisingly smoothly, in fact it was a fantastic occasion. The mums got on well – I think that was the key to it. There had been a bit of an incident the night before when the guy running the hotel got the hump about the noise in the early hours and shut the bar. I was safely tucked up in bed by then to be at my best for the big op in the morning, but by all accounts my cousin Charlie-boy got a jemmy out of his car and cleared the optics, so there were murders over that the next day. They didn’t know how lucky they were though – at least he hadn’t brought his nail-gun and tried to do some DIY for ’em.

  We didn’t have a lot of money to spend on it, but that night was one of the best parties I’ve ever been to. We had about 250 people and not a black eye or a freshly broken nose between them. When it was over, Elaine and I fucked off on honeymoon and came back to Scum. Then by the time we were in Canada for Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains a few months later – watching Roberto Durán beat Sugar Ray Leonard on TV, live from Montreal – we’d bought a house in Bredbury, Stockport, for twenty-eight grand.

  This was where the food parcels from Elaine’s mum came in. When we’d got married, I’d been quite old-fashioned about it, saying, ‘You don’t need to work no more, I’ll look after you.’ But it turned out that promise was much easier to make than it was to keep. The buzz around Scum having evaporated so quickly, and all of a sudden being 200 miles from home meant that there was very little prospect of getting any work.

  I had no choice but to sign on, which I didn’t like doing, but fuck me it was hard up there at that time. The mills had all just shut down and the unemployment was unbelievable – way worse than down south. If I’d been a Mancunian I could maybe have got more acting work, but they didn’t need another Londoner in Coronation Street, because they already had Mike Baldwin aka Johnny Briggs.

  The one positive thing about the whole situation for me – and I did have some great times up there – was in terms of my understanding of people. Without even realising it I had probably been raised to believe in a clear dividing line at Watford Gap services, where the Northerners started, but all I could see when I lived up there in the early eighties was a lot of really hard-working people who were having the choice to go to work taken away from them.

  Everyone wanted to be a cab driver, because if you’re a normal guy who is lucky enough to still have a car, that is the one job you can give yourself without anyone else’s say-so. The only problem was how many cabbies could Manchester sustain? Especially when there was hardly any trade because no one could afford to get a cab.

  In professional terms at that time in my life I couldn’t get arrested. But off-screen it seemed I got arrested all too easily. For someone with a quick temper
like mine, the possibility that someone might recognise you – which had become a fact of life after the second Scum came out – can make day-to-day life a lot more complicated. I was walking through the West End down in London one day, when I saw a security guy I knew outside Bobby’s Bar at the back of the Café Royal. I asked him what he was doing there and he said, ‘I’m looking after James Cagney – he’s inside talking to someone.’

  Cagney was one of my all-time favourite actors, so I decided to hang about for a while in the hope of saying hello to him when he came out of the bar. After about half an hour I had to go, so as not to be late for a meeting with an agent, but the bodyguard said he was going to be a while yet, so I decided to come back later. If I hadn’t made that decision I’d have been on the tube and gone in forty minutes’ time, instead of stepping off the kerb to cross Piccadilly on the way back to the Café Royal at the exact moment one of those motorcycle despatch riders decided to run a red light.

  He sees me step out, but instead of braking he revs up and comes at me even faster. I have to step back quickly to stop myself getting run over. Obviously I’ve called him a cunt or whatever under my breath and he’s heard me – I don’t know how through his helmet – and stopped his bike to have a row. But where he’s slammed on the brakes too suddenly he’s turned the front wheel and fallen off his bike onto the bonnet of a parked car. It’s not just me laughing at him now, it’s everyone at the crossing, and this doesn’t seem to have improved his mood, because now he’s charging at me like a lunatic.

  I’m all done up smart for my meeting in a new cream Mac and I’m on my way to meet Jimmy Cagney, so I am not interested in this geezer. But he’s still tearing towards me with his head down and his crash-helmet on, so I give him a bit of a barrage – bang, bang, bang – on the visor, but it’s still hurt him, and as I’ve upped him for what I thought was going to be the last time, his crash-helmet’s come off. At this point I’m seeing his biker’s earring with a cross in it and thinking, ‘Now you’re in trouble, mate’, so I give him a proper larrapping.

  I don’t want to get nicked, so I’ve got to have it away sharpish, which should be easy enough because there are thousands of people around. Unfortunately, a high proportion of those people suddenly seem to be wearing police uniforms. I don’t know how or why this has happened, but the Old Bill are coming at me from all sides. It’s as if a gate has opened in the Statue of Eros’s arsehole and they’ve all piled out, waving their truncheons like the Keystone Cops.

  At this crucial moment, some brain surgeon standing by the railings shouts out, ‘It’s the fella off of Scum!’ I give him a look as if to say, ‘Much obliged, mate – thank you very much.’ The police have got me in the long run now even if I do get away, which I don’t, because I am thoroughly nicked.

  The Old Bill take me away to the station round the back of Savile Row, and by the time I get there I can hear the other geezer shouting and screaming. They’ve pulled him ’cos I’ve said that he attacked me – counter-charge, and in any case it’s true. Once the police have got you for something, it’s best not to make a fuss – there’s no point turning them any further against you.

  Me and the biker had to go to court together at Bow Street magistrates court, which used to be just off Covent Garden, which isn’t there any more. We both said our piece and I ended up getting found guilty, which wasn’t really fair because he did attack me first, but because the police dragged me away I didn’t get a chance to find myself any witnesses.

  I was fined £120, which normally I’d delay paying as long as possible – ‘I’d like time, please, your honour’, that’s how you put it off – but on this occasion I just said, ‘I’ll give you a cheque now.’ The despatch rider – horrible geezer he was, totally in the wrong – was there too, so as I walked past him I said, ‘It was worth every fucking tenner, and if you want to come outside now, I’ll gladly have another hundred and twenty quid’s worth.’

  He didn’t accept my offer, which was probably good news for both of us. The whole day had been such a downer. I lost the chance to meet the great Jimmy Cagney and gained a big dent in my wallet, all because of this wanker on a motorbike – and me to a certain extent, because I could’ve avoided it if I hadn’t said anything when he nearly ran me over. As I’ve got older, I’ve learnt to avoid these kinds of situations much more effectively. It wasn’t so much that I used to start trouble – in fact I don’t think I’ve ever actively started a fight in my whole life – just that I wouldn’t make that leap to trying to keep myself out of it.

  ‘Attack is the best form of defence’ – that’s what I was taught – but really the best form of defence is not getting yourself in that position in the first place. Looking back on that incident with the biker now, I still think my dad and my granddad and his granddad before him (although then the messenger would’ve been riding a horse, not a motorbike) would have probably got in that fight, as well as all my mates and probably most of their wives.

  When I look at my two older daughters I think, ‘Yeah, probably them too.’ But then I was still doing all this stuff when they were kids growing up, and it couldn’t help but rub off on them. And hopefully now they’re all out in the big wide world they’re learning to do things differently. I’ve cleaned up my act a bit with my youngest, Ellie-Rae, so maybe she’ll be the start of a new way of doing things.

  Don’t get me wrong, I still think you’ve got to stand up for what you believe in. I got in some funny situations when things weren’t going too well as far as getting work was concerned and I certainly never regretted standing my ground in any of those.

  Mike Leigh has never really been my cup of tea as a director. I like some of the stuff he’s done, but it’s the actors that make it – I just think he’s a lucky fucker.

  I went up for one of his things quite early on in my career and he was bombarding me with all these really strange questions. I wasn’t ready for that because I didn’t know him yet. I thought it was too early to be getting into such personal areas. I remember he asked me something about my dad and I said, ‘What’s my dad got to do with it? My dad ain’t here.’ Mike Leigh said, ‘I’m just asking,’ and I got a bit narky with him: ‘Well, I don’t want to answer that, alright?’

  Then he told me he wanted me to ‘find a character’. I said ‘What character?’ And he said, ‘Make him up.’

  At that point I got to my feet and walked out. I said I had to go to the toilet, but in fact I just fucked off home. They sent a message back later asking what had happened and I said, ‘Ray’s character wanted to go to the toilet, and then he wanted to fuck off home.’

  The next person in after me that day was Mark Wingate who was in Quadrophenia with me. The story as I heard it was that Mike Leigh said, ‘Shock me!’ So Mark picked up the table in the room they were in and threw it out of the window. There was a rumour that the BBC made him pay for the damages, and if that was true then it was very wrong. If you’re going to play that game, then you’ve got to follow through with it. You wanted to be shocked, and he fucking shocked you, so no one except you should be paying for any windows that got broken.

  The Northern Irish actor Stephen Rea had a great victory over Mike Leigh by all accounts. Mike Leigh was following him down the road like he does when he’s getting you to do things and Stephen went into a pub. Mike Leigh crept in after him and hid under a table – all the usual bollocks was going on. But then Stephen came on the screen in a film that was showing on the pub TV. So he looked across at where Mike Leigh was hiding and called out, ‘Look, Mike, I’m on the telly!’ I don’t think he got the job either.

  Another meeting I didn’t get any work out of was with Steven Berkoff. It was for his play West, which he’d already done once and it was apparently quite famous, although I didn’t know too much about it at the time. The idea was for it to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek cockney Shakespeare, but quite surreal, and our first meeting was certainly surreal enough. I know Steven now and I like him, but it would be
true to say we didn’t quite hit it off at first.

  He’s standing there with some kind of jump-suit on, all zipped up to the top and his big dot in the middle of his forehead, rolling his Rs when he talks to me and going, ‘Rrrraymond-ah . . . I loved the way you walked across the room.’ So I go, ‘What do you want me to do then, mate?’ And he says, ‘I want you to walk in the bar and you’re looking for someone.’

  It’s all that kind of broad caricature stuff he wants me to do, but I don’t know that at the time. So I walk into this pub in my normal unobtrusive kind of way and just stand at the bar very quiet and not looking at anyone. Steven bellows, ‘Stop! What are you doing?’ and I say, ‘I’m looking for someone.’

  Steven says, ‘But you haven’t looked,’ and I say, ‘Exactly. When you’re looking for someone, Steven, you don’t look for someone. If I come in a pub and start looking around, they’ll all know what I’m doing.’ He’s getting exasperated now: ‘But I want you to look!’

  So that was another job I didn’t get. A fella I knew at the time called Ken did it in the end, and when I went to see the play the penny finally dropped. ‘Oh, fuck me,’ I thought to myself. ‘That’s what it’s all about.’ It was good, it was funny, but I’d thought it was a drama when it was actually more like a panto. Over time I’ve had to learn when to use what I got from Clarkey in terms of always trying to make things as real as possible, and when not to use it. Sometimes you might be doing something that’s in a completely different genre where playing it for real is not the best way to go. Asking yourself, ‘But how would I feel about this?’ isn’t something you necessarily need to do if you’re in a musical.

  It took me a few years to learn that, and it took me a few years to learn some other things as well. Drink-driving was another old habit that died hard. One time when I was still living up North I came home for the weekend and borrowed my sister’s car to go out for the evening with my mate Tony Yeates. That car had holes in the floor – it was like something Fred Flintstone would drive.