Ray Winstone leans across his garden table to offer me a cigarette. “I suffer with blood pressure,” he says, lighting his second in ten minutes. “I have to take tablets every day or else I’m in trouble.” Winstone, who found fame as the borstal thug in
Scum (1977) and geezered his way into cinema’s top drawer as the archetypal Cockney hard-nut, seems an unlikely campaigner for men’s health.
After all, he’s hardly impressed by my own efforts. “Given up fags? Drink black tea? You’re on a kick, aincha?” he laughs, eyes creased behind Mafiosi-hip wraparounds. Winstone, it rapidly transpires, is not an act. There’s no “real” fey Ray behind the persona, no showbiz goss or chilled Perrier. There he sits, grizzly bearded in the classic Clacton-daytripper combo of short sleeves and dodgy shorts, a 48-year-old father of three, soaking up the sun in a paddock behind his large Essex farmhouse. So, what on earth is he doing campaigning for prostate cancer awareness? The standard story doesn’t fit. Health-charity activists normally get involved because either they or someone close to them has suffered the relevant illness. Prostate cancer has never come that close to Winstone — as far as he knows. No, he was recruited through that essential Winstonian institution, the boozer.
Roydon, his local village, has five pubs, but four years ago he walked into the Crusader first, and liked the place. “It’s a proper old pub with interesting people from all walks,” he says. “They were running a fundraising drive in the Crusader last year; a couple of guys at the pub had had prostate cancer scares. I talk to these people every day, but I didn’t know that. But that’s the point. I don’t know of anyone in my family or among my friends who had prostate cancer but you wouldn’t know because men don’t talk about having something wrong in their, um, penis area. The fundraiser was purely local, but then I started to hear more about the disease and became interested in raising awareness.”
And so the Prostate Cancer Charity suddenly found itself with a box-office star campaigner, one who was happy to wear its new wristband bearing the slogan: “Know about it” and to declare: “Don’t be embarrassed. No matter what your age, find out what the symptoms are, and check that you don’t have them.”
As role models go, Winstone is hardly a living signpost to the path of righteousness but, fortunately, the world has plenty of good middle-class public figures to guide the “worried well”. Winstone, the wide-boy car salesman from Last Orders, the destructive Sarf-London husband in Nil By Mouth, the repentant gangster of Sexy Beast, is perfectly cast for contacting that great lost mass of men, the “worried well-hard”, the sort of blokes who would rather have wasps pushed up their backsides than undergo a health check.
And, just like the guys who readily identify with him, Winstone is, whisper it softly, a bit of a hypochondriac. Along with the filter-tips, the bar and the bravado, there’s a middle-aged man who worries. “I had a bit of a scare recently when I was away filming in America,” he confides. “I pulled a muscle in my chest. Well, your heart’s a muscle but it wasn’t that one. Have you ever had that pain? It’s this amazing stabbing pain. I thought I was having a heart attack. But that’s the time of life that I’m at, I suppose.”
He started out fit enough. As an East London teenage welterweight boxer, Winstone won 80 out of 88 bouts, was three times the city’s schoolboy champion and twice fought for England. You won’t see him out pounding the roads, though. “I did so many years in the gym as a child it burnt me out for life. I get a nosebleed just thinking about training.”
There are putative plans for a fitness drive, inspired it seems by his wife, to whom he’s been married for 26 years. “Me and Elaine, we are going to get some equipment, one of those — what are they? — cross-training things and a running machine. I won’t use the running machine. It’s not my style. I’ve got strong eyes, you know: I’ve got some weights in the room over there (he sticks a thumb at his newly built pavilion) and I keep looking at them. There’s other equipment in there that I don’t use as well; a local gym closed down so I bought a couple of machines. But, you know, you get home from work and you’re knackered, you don’t want do go doing all that stuff.”
Winstone displays other classic symptoms of the Quietly Worried Bloke, such as an obsessive squirreling of health “facts”. Ask him about his weight (he looks a happy and healthy-looking shade of hefty): “I’ve only got to look at something and I put on weight, though I lose it easily. Most of my weight is fluid. If you cut salt out, it’s easy to lose pounds because salt retains fluids.” Really? Where did you get that idea? “It’s all inside my head mate,” he laughs. “No, I picked up all this health stuff over the years. I like watching the Discovery channel.”
A further giveaway is his rigorously justified avoidance of health professionals. “I’m not a great one for going to the doctor. Nowadays, you ring up the GP and they ask what’s wrong with you. I thought that was their job to do diagnoses. And then there’s a three-day waiting list, so by the time you see them you’re either better or dead,” he says.
He gets lectured regularly by film-set doctors about his smoking, though he points out that it’s not even his fault he started. “I didn’t touch cigarettes until I was 24, when I had to play a chainsmoker in a film called All Washed Up.” Nevertheless, he remains staunchly resistant to advice. “I have to have medicals all through the year to meet the insurance requirements for making films. I give a sigh of relief when I pass. But they always go on about the cigs.”
And alcohol? Well, that’s just a matter of perception. “I’m a binger. I could drink for England,” he declares. “I can drink all night and I’ll still be standing up, sweet as a nut. I only drink once or twice a week, but people always see you when you’re drinking, so you get a reputation. If I drank that much regularly, I’d never be able to do all the acting work I do.”
He is indeed busy, having just finished recording Vincent, a four-part TV series, he is now in the midst of filming The Departed, a Martin Scorsese film, alongside Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Breaking and Entering, an Anthony Minghella film, with Jude Law and Juliette Binoche. After that, he will film Sweeney Todd for the BBC, which is co-produced by his own production company, Size 9 Productions. After that comes Beowulf, a film directed by Robert Zemeckis. A feature about William Blake is in the pipeline, too.
“Overwork?” asks Winstone. “If I was a lorry driver I would have to work every day. Most people have to do something they don’t want to do every day just to put food on the family table. Anyway, it keeps me out of trouble. I am lucky enough to be working for most of the year. It’s more stressful than I’d like, but there you go.”
He is, however, trying to look after his stress levels, not least because there’s now a toddler running around the house, a late, though planned, addition to his two grown-up daughters. “I’ve got a four-year-old girl and I want to be there for her when she’s older,” he says. “I do plan in relaxation time.” He points to the feature-packed silver gadget on the table in front of him.
“Mobiles are the biggest stress you can have. People are always after something from you on them. So every year, I just turn it off for three or four months and retire from it all.”
Prostate cancer - the man killer
The charity runs a confidential helpline staffed by specialist nurses which takes more than 16,000 calls a year. It is open from 10am to 4pm, Monday to Friday, and on Wednesdays from 7am to 9pm (0845 3008383).
