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Ray Winstone was born on February 19, 1957, in Hackney Hospital in London, England, to Margaret (Richardson) and Raymond J. Winstone. He moved to Enfield, at age seven, where his parents had a fruit and vegetable business. He started boxing at the age of twelve at the famous Repton Amateur Boxing Club, was three times London Schoolboy Champion and fought twice for England, UK. In ten years of boxing, he won over 80 medals and trophies.

Ray studied acting at the Corona School before being cast by director Alan Clarke as Carlin in the BBC Play production of Scum (1979). He has appeared in numerous TV series over the past 20 years including Robin of Sherwood (1984), Palmer (1991), Birds of a Feather (1989), Between the Lines (1992), Ghostbusters of East Finchley (1995), Births, Marriages and Deaths (1999), and Vincent (2005). His film career has burgeoned since his award-winning role in Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth (1997), and he has appeared in multiple films including Fanny and Elvis (1999), Tim Roth's The War Zone (1999), The Departed (2006), Hugo (2011), and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012). Known for his signature gritty voice, Winstone has also done a number of voiceover roles including Rango (2011), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), as well as the Beowulf (2007) film and video games.

He married Elaine Winstone in 1979, and the couple have three children: Lois Winstone (born 1982), a singer with the London-based hip-hop group "Crack Village" who also played his on-screen daughter in Last Orders (2001) and got a part in four episodes of The Bill (1984), Jaime Winstone (born 1985) also an actress with ambitions to be a director, and Ellie Rae Winstone (born 2001).

All the great Shakespeare plays are about killing. Alas, poor Yorick,
that&#39;s about death. And in Romeo and Juliet everyone up ends up dying.
The greatest dramas in the world are all about sex, violence and
death.

I&#39;m not a successful Hollywood actor. The Hollywood stuff hasn&#39;t come
out yet. It might come out and I might be shit.

Hollywood don&#39;t always pay a lot of money. Because we&#39;re English they
think we&#39;re cheap! And you haven&#39;t got to be the greediest man in the
world. If you want to do something, you go and do it. What&#39;s the point
of you being paid a lot of money if you haven&#39;t got the quality of the
film? In the long run you&#39;re not doing yourself any favors because
you&#39;re going to end up in a piece of shit.

On every job you do, you&#39;ve got to raise your game. My ambition is to
just get better and better every job you do - you should never stop
trying to get better. You have to teach yourself new things - I don&#39;t
think you necessarily learn them from other people because you have
your own style of doing things, but hopefully you get better.

Unless it&#39;s your business or something, bankrupt just means you can&#39;t
have a bank account.

Well, you create your own persona, don&#39;t you? And you have to live with that. But the people that I meet, they don&#39;t think that I&#39;m a lunatic. And if they do, then that&#39;s OK, because it means that I&#39;m playing the parts all right.

If you can get in a ring with 2000 people watching and be smacked around by another guy, then walking onstage isn&#39;t hard.

Quotes

Ray Winstone

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