HOWZAT

After Nil By Mouth, scripts flooded in for films such as Sexy Beast, Love Honour and Obey and the controversial Tim Roth film War Zone, in which Ray played an abuser.

“I’ve had a variety of roles, but not from choice, I’m not that clever,” he insists. “I’ve been lucky enough to get interesting and good scripts. You hear about all that typecasting, but you only typecast yourself because there are a million ways to play everything. I never set out to play different characters, just to do good scripts.”

Success has enabled him to play a role in real life that has long appealed — that of the country squire. He lives in well-heeled comfort on the Hertfordshire-Essex border with his wife Elaine and daughters Lois, 21, Jaime, 17, and two-year-old Ellie, and professes to a weakness for shopping trips up west with “the boys” every once in a while. He has recently completed the medieval epic Arthur in Ireland with the top action producer Jerry Bruckheimer, alongside Clive Owen and Keira Knightley, and has also set up his own production company, which is developing two film projects — about William Blake and Albert Pierrepoint — and an ITV1 thriller called She’s Gone. But perhaps the true sign that he has finally arrived is that he will provide the voice of Soldier Sam in The Magic Roundabout.

Going into the production side was a necessary evil for Winstone, who has no real ambition to be anywhere but front of camera. “I don’t really like the idea of being on the other side of it all,” he says, taking a sip from his mug and stretching out his legs. “I like doing what I do, but you fall into it because you have projects you’re interested in and it’s the only way you can get them off the ground. You meet people over the years who can help you and who you can trust. You’d be mad not to make the most of that.”

He finishes his tea just as there is a knock at the door calling him back on set. “Have you got enough, babe?” he asks, and with that, he’s off for a spot of jousting with the lads.

Hooray henrys

Henry VIII actors Ray Winstone has to live up to

Arthur Bourchier Played the king in the 1911 silent film.

Charles Laughton (x2) Won a Best Actor Oscar for The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933. He played Henry again, to Jean Simmons’s Elizabeth I, in Young Bess (1953).

Richard Burton was a passionate and headstrong Henry, in Anne of the Thousand Days (1969).

Keith Michell (x3) Played the corpulent monarch on stage in The King’s Mare, on television in the 1971 mini series The Six Wives of Henry VIII and on screen in the 1973 film Henry VIII and his Six Wives.

Sid James Elevated English history to a bedhopping farce with his trademark leer in Carry On Henry (1971).

Henry VIII, Sunday, ITV1, 9pm; part two, Sunday, Oct 19

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